Thread by @hhesterm

The US has 10s of millions of doses of AZ vaccine in storage. It has not admitted the vaccine, but does not allow AZ to export. Now I do not engage in this debate, but I am interested in the meta-debate, the debate about the debate (short thread) nytimes.com/2021/03/11/us/…

I have not seen this NY Times story from yesterday in my timeline. I think it is safe to say that it has not caused anything near the outrage that was caused by Germany being slow administering AZ and having 1 million doses on storage. /2

So why the difference? I know some people will say “but the US was not talking AZ or the UK down”. Which only leads to more curiosity, because it means that we’ve also missed stories like this one. /3 theguardian.com/society/2020/o…

My guess: vaccines are an additional log of wood thrown into the fire of an escalating UK-EU conflict. The arguments about the vaccine are honestly felt. But all our attention is focused on the this one dispute. We perceive things relevant to that debate - not others. /4

Curiously in this context I am not sure CANZUK is actually a thing. The Canadian vaccine council took the same decisions as the German one (no recommendation of AZ for old people), but much later, ironically just a couple of days before the German one changed its recommendation/5

Again: little outrage. Which seems to imply that we (UK) are more emotionally engaged by what Germany does than what Canada does. Before Brexit we said “well, it’s an EU thing”. Now we’d say “well it’s a Brexit thing”. But the thing is: it’s a thing. /6

@jillongovt rightly reminds me that the UK (the government) rightly took issue with Fauci when he criticised US processes. But I don’t remember a public debate anywhere near as intense as the UK-EU one. In fact, I think the UK-US reaction is as things should be.