Comment by DoingIsLearning | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DoingIsLearning | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

DoingIsLearning

What bothers me the most, is the delay in signing the vacine contracts with Pfizer and AstraZeneca.

The US for all the criticism it can take, closed this negotiation in weeks. We spent a whopping 3 months arguing with pharma companies about price and liability before closing these contracts.

There are people dying avoidable deaths while we allowed for this inertia. There are no serious media outlets pushing the European Comission for answers on this failing. There will be no hearing to find a cause for this failing. As a very pro-european citizen this made me very bitter, there could have been a strong EU wide vaccination programme and EU transnational solidarity but instead we see this blunder that will set us back for months probably +1 year of these lockdowns and economic damage.

I imagine the US has a ton of leverage in such negotiations. Something along the lines of "give us a good price on this to make us look good or else maybe we'll actually do something about the ridiculous price gouging for medicine in this country."

No pharma exec wants to be the one that killed the golden goose.

Both the Netherlands, France and Germany, were already ready to close contracts, when the EC stepped in to do an EU wide contract. It absolutely makes sense to do an EU wide contract rather than depend on the solidarity of larger countries that order surplus.

The issue is the EC went on a panel wide long discussion to then get to more or less a carbon copy of the initial german contract. Those were 3 months wasted that could have made a difference in ramping up vaccine manufacturing.

It seems to me that, if negotiation leverage is the crucial factor here, then wouldn't the US and EU be in a similar spot?

The EU's economy is roughly the same size as the US's[0], but the EU has roughly a little over 445 million citizens compare to the US's ~330 million.

I would imagine that EU countries paying for the healthcare of 445 million citizens would be considered as quite a large "customer" for pharmaceutical companies and could strike a good deal.

How does the US get an edge in negotiations over the EU? It feels that military power wouldn't factor here, but I'm having trouble coming up with other ideas. What else could it be?

[0]: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/2995521/10868691/2-1...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com