Quote:
Originally Posted by Sephiroth
I wonder what the ordinary EU people make of all this vaccine stuff?
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We had a team call the week before last and in the call were people from Belgium, France, Austria, Sweden, Germany, The Netherlands and of course the UK. Two of the team have had vaccinations, one German and one UK, both due to being in risk groups.
The rest of us can’t wait for ours. On the whole AZ vaccine thing, we get the technical reasons why there’s a delay. Two of the team are working with the sites in Belgium and The Netherlands to fine tune the manufacturing. In general, they were happy for us in the UK and the progress made, noting, in the worst case, that when we’re done, it’s pretty likely that production will then feed their local demands.
The general feeling was that each country should have gone their own way in approving and buying the vaccine and that a centralised approach is not nimble enough for this type of situation. The political fallout at a local level is the biggest outcome of this.
There is a degree of vaccine nationalism, especially from my German colleagues who were definitely bigging up the BioNTech vaccine!
My Dutch buddy did say that it was about time the UK did something right which made me laugh (I don’t take these things personally - a criticism of how we have run things is not a criticism of me)
In all, pretty pragmatic. If we’re looking for someone to blame then it’s national government, followed by Astra Zeneca, followed by the EMA/EC. The UK doesn’t feature.
Of course, poor polling. This was a small group of well educated people who understand the underlying issues. Things might be different with the wider population.