Thread by @jfkirkegaard

@joebiden wants 100mn Americans vaccinated in 100days - that means ~115mn or just over 1/3 of all Americans will have received at least first jab by late April. That frankly is a pretty timid and certainly NOT a moonshot, or even enough to get out of lockdowns soon enough. 1/13

@joebiden's plans though are much more ambitious than say France and @EmmanuelMacron, who outrageously just aims to vaccinate 15mn (a little more than 1/4 of pop) elderly and chronically ill before the summer. 2/13 gouvernement.fr/info-coronavir…

This suggests that the most EU countries, like France, which already lags the US in vaccinations- will continue to do so throughout the 1H of 2020 principally due to the unbelievably low level of ambition of their national vaccination programs. Only Denmark currently exceeds 3/13

US (and UK) levels of vaccinations at comparable periods after vaccine approval, and the Danish government has announced its intension to vaccinate 100% of the Danish population by late June. Given the enormous benefits of rapid vaccination, the Danish timetable is NOT that 4/13

impressive but should guarantee (mutations permitting) the Danes a relatively normal summer holiday. It defies belief that other EU governments won't make similar ambitious vaccine commitments, even as the EU now targets 70% vaccination by the summer 5/13 ec.europa.eu/commission/pre…

In fact the already existing differences in vaccine rollout across the EU are galling. Given @EU_Commission tells us that 13.1mn doses have now been made available to EU27 (+Norway) based on population, EU government "vaccine competence to date" can be charted. Correlation 6/13

between % of vaccines utilized and % of population vaccinated is (by definition, given distribution key) essentially 1. Differences today are remarkable already - How can DK have utilized 100+% of vaccines (extracting extra doses from each vial) and begun vaccination of 3+% 7/13

of Danes by Jan 19th, and (fellow frugal :-) ) NL have utilized less than 20% of available vaccs and begun vaccinating less than 0.5% of the Dutch? Isn't there a Dutch election coming up? How is FR at 30%, DE at 50%, among the world's richest countries in NO and LU at >1/3? 8/13

IT and ES among larger EU members does best at around 70%. These are, in light of the ongoing race with #Covid19 mutations NOT trivial differences across the EU. In rich and generally well organized EU economies there is no real good reason for not roughly "matching Denmark" 9/13

in vaccine rollout. Had other EU governments done this, more than 7mn additional Europeans would have commenced covid-vaccination by January 19 2021. More than 1.4mn additional French would have been, 1.3mn Germans, almost 500K Dutch, 170K Swedes etc. Recalling how early 10/13

vaccination drives must target the elderly, such numbers already represent a material share of the 65y+ population. 16% more of LU 65y+ would already have begun vaccination had LU matched DK vaccine performance, 14% of NL elderly, 12% of NO, 11% in BE and FR. What do 11/n

political leaders in these countries tell their elderly voters? We don't care enough? Sorry, we are incompetent? In hindsight, EU should clearly have paid whatever it cost to secure adequate number of all vaccines under development early (and then promptly donated leftovers 12/13

to other countries. Human and economic gains would have been orders of magnitudes higher of faster vaccinations. But at a minimum now, EU leaders must be ambitious and competent in vaccine rollouts. If not, they will pay a heavy political price - and they will deserve to. END

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