Solidarity Forever!

If you want the ultimate in centralization (not to mention free riding), you could do worse than considering the European Union. The editors of the Wall Street Journal go to the videotape (as Warner Wolf used to say):

As the European Union fumbles its vaccine rollout, officials in Brussels are looking for villains. They think they’ve found one in vaccine-maker AstraZeneca.

Rather than letting countries negotiate their own vaccine contracts, the European Commission handled procurement for the entire bloc in the name of solidarity. Brussels botched the process, and now the union’s members are lagging together.

Europe, the U.S. and U.K. have orders or options for roughly the same number of doses per capita. But the U.S. and U.K. moved faster to secure contracts, which made it easier for pharmaceutical companies to prepare. Washington and London also spent about seven times as much on development, production and procurement per person, according to the British analytics firm Airfinity. Some U.S. states face distribution challenges like many European countries, but American and British regulators approved vaccines faster than their EU counterparts.

The results are already clear. By our deadline Thursday, the U.K. had administered doses to more than 11% of residents, while the U.S. was approaching 8%. Denmark was a European success story at 3.7%, while France and Sweden languished around 2%.

Consider this story in relation to my earlier post. How, precisely, can we vaccinate the entire world? The World Health Organization’s initiative against smallpox began in 1959 and finally succeeded 28 years later. With SARS-CoV-2’s rate of mutation and how easy it is to contract, we don’t have 28 years. The lesson here is that bureaucracies can be successful but it is very difficult for them to be successful fast.

There’s been tremendous variance here in the United States among the various states in the percentages of their populations that have been vaccinated along with complaints about how long it is taking. Can you imagine what would have happened if we had insisted on solidarity, perfect equality, and, as they are calling it now, “equity”? Now expand that to 170 countries.