The EU’s vaccine shortage is not just a medical emergency. With China and Russia making headway by marketing their vaccines in Central and Eastern Europe, the EU faces a geopolitical problem entirely of its own making.
As of March 15, the bloc had administered 11 doses per 100 people, compared with 33 in the United States and 39 in the United Kingdom. With a million vaccinations a day, in contrast to over 2 million in America and around 400,000 in Britain, the gap between the EU and its closest partners risks widening.
Europe’s political leadership deserves a large portion of the blame for the shortfall, from the European Commission’s handling of vaccine procurement to France’s President Emmanuel Macron and other European politicians’ casting aspersions on AstraZeneca’s work. The result? The limited supply of available vaccines, especially of AstraZeneca, often goes unused because of the public’s distrust. Two weeks ago France sent 15,000 doses to Slovakia and 15,000 to the Czech Republic, expecting that they would not be used at home. On Monday, Germany, France, and Italy suspended the use of AstraZeneca’s vaccine due to concerns over the vaccine’s potential link with blood clots — an association rejected by the World Health Organization.
Enter China and Russia. With vaccines that have undergone nothing like the scrutiny facing those made in the U.S., U.K., and EU, neither Russia nor China should be Europe’s preferred medicinal vendor. Yet Russia sold 4 million doses of its Sputnik V, which has not yet been approved by the European Medicines Agency (EMA), to Hungary and Slovakia, which will administer them under national-emergency authorization measures. In Slovakia, the decision has started a government crisis that might well bring down the center-right government of Igor Matovič.
[Interesting Read]
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