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Read: The one area where the U.S. COVID-19 strategy seems to be working

The European Union is partly to blame for this debacle. It approached vaccine procurement in its right-minded European way, using the purchasing power of a bloc that represents 446 million people to negotiate for lower prices, and protecting the peoples interests by holding pharmaceutical companies responsible in case of problems with new vaccines rushed to market. By contrast, early last year, Donald Trump and his British fraternal twin, Boris Johnson, moved swiftly to partner with drug companies in vaccine development, dismissed liability concerns, and secured first dibs on the end product.

So far, the Anglo-American approach looks like the better one: The United States is already awash with vaccines, and expects more than a billion doses to be delivered by the end of this year. Americans are getting vaccinated at an astonishing clipan average of 2 million shots in a single daywhile here in France, three months into the vaccination campaign, only 2.5 million people, out of a population of 67 million, had been fully vaccinated as of March 24. The United Kingdom has also been vaccinating up a storm. Add a little post-Brexit bitterness to our seething European envy when we see more than 844,000 people vaccinated on a single day in Britain. While less than 10 percent of the French population has received a first dose at this point, 29 million Britons have had their first jab.

The bitterness we feel watching Britain and the United States do better is compounded by a sense of unfairness. European countries, unlike the majority of countries in the world, have the wherewithal to produce their own COVID-19 vaccines. AstraZeneca is an Anglo-Swedish company. Pfizers vaccine was developed jointly with BioNTech, which is German. The multinational corporation Johnson & Johnson manufactures in Europe. The problem is that not all the vaccines produced in Europe stay in Europe. While the European Union has struggled to fulfill its vaccine needs, its been exporting vaccines to countries around the worldsome 41 million doses to more than 30 countries, including 10 million to Britain and even a million doses to the United States. Exasperated, the EU moved on March 24 to block for six weeks the export of vaccines produced in Europe to countries with higher vaccination rates.

Read: Britains vaccine nationalism

Europes frustrations are particularly understandable with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. A multinational giant with a global supply chain, J&J produces COVID-19 vaccine in Europe and ships it to the United States for bottling. But the finished vials are blocked from being re-exported to Europe, thanks to an outright ban on the export of vaccines or vaccine components, the European Council president, Charles Michel, has complained. Europe learned during the Trump years that it could not count on the United States. Its learning now that in an era of vaccine nationalism, the moral high ground of international cooperation has yielded in the United States and Britain to an our-people-first-because-we-can approach to a terrible global crisis.

See more here:
Why America Is Beating Europe on Vaccination - The Atlantic