The Corona Pandemic

Fucking clowns.

Maybe trying to distract from the massive own goals of shouting about obligations in a contract that its publication, that you insisted upon, showed were bollocks.

Well said, you’ll probably get slaughtered on here for doing so.
I also voted remain.

1 Like

Just for clarity, the EU as a single entity provided €1.78bn of up-front funding to pharma compared to €1.9bn by the UK (1). But on top of that, Germany has provided €375m to BioNTech and €252m to Curevac (2). Ontop of that, the US has funded US$1.2 directly to Oxford, which would make them the largest investor in the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine (3). Both the EU and the UK have committed €500m and £500m respectively to COVAX for supporting the 92 poor and middle income countries.

UK has bet on half a dozen as well, and in fact on a greater variety than the EU: 100m from Oxford, 40m from Pfizer, 17m from Moderna, 60m from Novavax, 30m from Janssen, 60m from GSK, 60m from Valneva for a total of 367m ordered (4)

EU on the other hand has 400m from Oxford, 300m from GSK, 300m from Pfizer and 160m from Moderna for a total of 1.6b ordered (5) . (aaahh there must be some smaller quantity ones not listed to make up the shortfall that my figures show)

So IMO its quite wrong to suggest European countries have not put up capital that they won’t see a return on. As a whole they have put up more than the UK by a margin. While the US has made the highest payment to the Oxford vaccine for development.

The Oxford-AstraZeneca is no more a UK exclusive vaccine than the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is a German one. I don’t think you’ll find anyone on here who thinks the EU’s move of blocking exports isn’t a dog act. But right now unfortunately every country is seeing it as every man for himself. We can see that in the US, in the UK, in the EU, in India to name a few. I would ask the simple question - would Canada be sharing their vaccines out ahead of their citizens if they had the advantage of significant vaccine development within their borders? NZ? Australia? I cannot imagine a world leader deciding that. That amounts to political suicide Not even Ardern would do that. Politician’s gonna politic.

Do I like the current situation? Fuck no. Am I in a country that’s benefiting from it? Yes. And its maybe why the majority of the Brits on here are keeping relatively quiet compared to normal in this thread while those that are most outraged are those from NZ, Canada etc, that are being frozen out of vaccines. This is a fucking nasty world right now. Sometimes movies scripts about the selfishness of humans are quite accurate.

4 Likes

Gotta remove that hidden data…

It’s a pain…but whoopsie…

1 Like

VDL needs to go after this. Some have said before that she was a liability, these past couple of days confirm it. No doubt others were involved but hard to believe anyone involved over the past few years, with trying to secure peace on this island was maintained, agreed with the actions this evening. We will however find out as time passes.

3 Likes

I’m lost. Can someone explain to me what the fuck is going on?

I thought I understood it yesterday, and now it appears I don’t.

1 Like

Some trainee clearly pushed that big orange and green button labeled ‘Article 16’ they have in Brussels without having read the manual. All makes sense now!

There’s a more obvious and more likely explanation, imo.

Incidentally the EU committed €500m to Covax and the UK £548m.

In a few months we will run out of space to store the excess vaccines when we run out of people to inject it into. What’s happening now is a post brexit cock swinging game

1 Like

Well she is only new to the job and probably hasn’t been fully trained in yet,therefore could be considered a trainee🙄.Now let’s move on and never speak of this again,nothing to see here😗

1 Like

It is the most shocking thing the EU has ever done to my mind. Probably the most sensitive border in or with the European Union, and the Taoiseach was not even informed beforehand. There just isn’t a good explanation, either the EC is so chaotically organized that momentous decisions like closing a member states border can happen seemingly capriciously at a middle level, or the decision was taken at a high level with a callous disregard for the Republic. In either scenario, the EC has been dishonest repeatedly since.

This, coming after a week in which VdL repeatedly advanced an extremely aggressive interpretation of a contract that since published has been shown to have no real support at all for that interpretation. My suspicion is that she listens to Commission lawyers about the same way she listens to German military planners - there is no way that absurdities like the assertion that the best efforts language ceased to operate as soon as the vaccine was actually developed were actually informed by the advice of a legal professional. She decided what she wanted or needed it to say now, and started pounding the table.

3 Likes

I was hoping you’d explain it to me like I explain stuff to my five year old, then you said cock swinging contest which he wouldn’t understand, then I remembered he goes to school so he probably would, then I realised he doesn’t go to school anymore.

I want this all to stop now.

2 Likes

Willy swinging then maybe?

Ah right. Now I get it.

Greece may disagree!

I did have to think about that one. Maybe it would be more precise to specify the EC. In the Greece situation, the EC had a near-consensus from the rest of the members. In this case, it appears to have been completely unilateral, a surprise to all of the member states.

3 Likes

I’m with you but the Greeks will see it differently.

Yeah, as I thought about the differences, I realized the key thing was the Greece decisions were democratic in one sense, brutal though they may have been. Closing the Irish border appears to have purely an EC decision.