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Comment by raverbashing | Hacker News Reader

"Severely lags behind" well, only if we're considering the top performers

Countries that are ahead of the EU (on avg.) per person doses are mostly small (Israel, UAE, Chile). Comparable are the UK, US and China

In terms of actual doses the EU is behind the US and maybe China (debatable numbers).

The rest are behind

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

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According to the Bloomberg tracker[1] the United states has given 24.9% of the population at least one shot and 13.5% two shots. The EU has given 8.7% one dose and 3.8% two doses. The United States is administrating 2.5 million doses a day and the EU is administrating 1.1 million doses a day, although the EU has a larger population. Also the rate of vaccines administered in the EU is down from 1.5 million a day from the prior week, while the US rate is going up. So severely behind seems about right.

[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/covid-vaccine-tracker-glo...

"Severely behind" the country doing the most vaccinations per day, but not on a general comparison. (Though yes last week the amount given was lower)

I completely agree the EU could be doing a better job, but in terms of general comparison, it's not doing bad

(It's doing better than Canada/Australia/Japan) for example.

No, it's doing bad.

Canada should, by all means, be doing much worse than the EU, being a politically low-power country. Being roughly the same as the EU is bad.

Australia basically has eradicated covid.

Japan has the pandemic largely under control as well.

The EU, for all its socialism and condescension of the US, should by all means be clobbering the US. But it's getting clobbered.

>"The EU, for all its socialism and condescension of the US, should by all means be clobbering the US. But it's getting clobbered."

The US has never lacked the decisiveness and the ability to mobilize.

The US lacks decisiveness ("you can always trust the Americans to do the right thing after all other options are exhausted" etc) but has the ability to mobilize (state capacity). We're just only good at one thing - war metaphors.

So we can't keep a lockdown going because that's not a war. But we can do vaccines great, that's just metaphorically shooting people.

>"So we can't keep a lockdown going because that's not a war."

I am not from US (live in Canada) but my impression is that the US population is in general way less subservient to the government comparatively to other countries. This could be just the reason you could not lock them up.

>"But we can do vaccines great, that's just metaphorically shooting people"

I find this conflation very poor

> The US has never lacked the decisiveness and the ability to mobilize.

It's dithering in both World Wars (among many, many other examples) would lead many people to question the decisiveness side of that.

Not sure about WWI events but from what I understand WWII did not pose immediate danger to the US and there was no pressing need for them to decide. From what I understand they were even happy to trade with the Germany. Once Pearl Harbor happened it changed the picture.

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