Cleaning up Europe’s vaccine mess

Cleaning up Europe’s vaccine mess

BRUSSELS - COVID-19 has caused vast suffering across Europe, and the European Union's slow vaccine rollout threatens to prolong the agony. If the region's leaders do not take decisive action soon, the pandemic could cause irreversible damage to the EU itself.When the coronavirus hit the region in 2020, EU member states were unable to agree on vaccine deployment - their main line of defense against it. National governments entrusted vaccine procurement to the European Commission, but then failed to harmonize their production and distribution strategies, or reach a consensus on which groups should be vaccinated first. More recently, 13 European countries suspended use of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine after a small number of people who had received it developed atypical vascular thrombosis.The EU's first priority for the coming weeks must be to address the vaccine shortage. Here again, member states have failed to agree, and some are not hesitating to shop outside the EU for supplies. Hungary is distributing the Russian Sputnik V vaccine, Slovakia has purchased it, and the Czech Republic is considering doing so, while Hungary has also bought hundreds of thousands of doses of the Chinese Sinopharm vaccine. Furthermore, Austria and Denmark recently announced a separate agreement with Israel for the production