Won't Learn, Won't Change - That's EU

David Wallace-Wells’ very long article points out that:

“For decades, the richest nations of the world had told themselves a story in which wealth and medical superiority offered, if not total immunity from disease, then certainly a guarantee against pandemics, regarded as a premodern residue of the underdeveloped world. That arrogance has made the coronavirus not just a staggering but an ironic plague.”

And as it has turned out:

“It was these countries that suffered most, died most, flailed most.”

 

Even within those countries, the EU has handled it particularly badly. It started with a (Western) belief that the disease can’t be controlled, that China too would fail. Worse, the one measure that was used (and worked) across Asia – lockdowns – was dismissed contemptuously:

“The shutdown was seen not as a demonstration of extreme seriousness but as a sign of the reflexive authoritarianism of the Chinese regime (and the imagined servility of its population).”

They never stopped to think that “China was not in the habit of quarantining entire metropolises”, let alone “super-affluent” cities like Wuhan. Even months later, as the epidemic ravaged Europe, lockdowns were deemed unacceptable:

“There were problematic invocations of “Confucian” culture and mischaracterizations of liberal democracies like Japan and Taiwan as “authoritarian.”

God forbid, Europe should learn from Asia. Adam Tooze oozes contempt:

“I’ve been impressed by the Sinophobia that it has revealed in Europe.”

 

Then the epidemic hit Italy. And looking back, it’s true that:

“The countries that were hardest hit, were not the countries that had the most contact with China. Many of the countries that were hardest hit were the countries that had contact with northern Italy.”

And yet:

“Italy’s outbreak didn’t inspire immediate responses elsewhere on the Continent, and neither did Spain’s.”

 

Having ruled out lockdowns, the West decided that “hitting the Science button” alone would solve the problem. Quarantining ain’t for us. We won’t wear masks. But unlike the US, UK, India, China and Russia, the EU then went on to fail to design a vaccine. That was followed by the blunder of focussing on negotiating the best price for the vaccine rather than ensuring supplies. As Alex Tabarrok sarcastically put it, the EU governments failed the “world’s easiest cost-benefit test”, namely that billions (saved via price negotiations) are less than trillions (economic impact of the epidemic).

 

As if so many screwups weren’t enough, some European countries briefly banned the AstraZeneca vaccine because it might cause some very rare blood clots. As Tabarrok wrote in another article:

“The end result is that more people will die from the halt than could possibly have been saved by the halt.”

 

Which brings me to my last point, something Michael Mina, a Harvard epidemiologist captures perfectly:

“Public health is engineering systems to benefit the population in a way that is sometimes entirely at odds with medicine. Sometimes you need to sacrifice some people for the benefit of the population as a whole. You take risks that maybe a doctor isn’t willing to take… You optimize the immunological protection of the population.”

Sacrifice some people for the benefit of the population as a whole? That sounds (shudder) so communistic. And yet both India and the US have taken that stance. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

 

After the fiasco of the epidemic, the UK and the US turned a new leaf by vaccinating folks at a scorching speed. Leading Tyler Cowen to remark:

“Countries are good at very different things. And it’s not all wrapped up in one happy bundle.”

The EU, strangely, seems to be good at nothing when it comes to the epidemic.