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[National Review] The EU's Self-Inflicted Vaccine Debacle
Policy failures are costing lives, but will the EU learn from its mistakes?
On the eve of the EU’s first antigen-type vaccine clearance, its rollout of COVID shots already had the look of a train wreck.
On January 29, the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, a type known as “viral vector,” received a “conditional marketing authorization” for use in the EU on the recommendation of the Union’s European Medicines Agency. But a week earlier, the company’s expected lead role in vaccinating the EU’s population of 450 million had begun to run into trouble. The next few weeks may determine whether the EU’s response to the pandemic manages to become, if belatedly, an adequate one or whether the EU’s citizens will keep dying at high rates, with policy failure exacerbating the pandemic’s natural toll. The EU is home to around 5.74 percent of the global population, but its cumulative COVID-19 deaths will soon reach a full 19 percent of the world’s total.
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