Krugman trashes the EU over the COVID vaccinations

Paul Krugman ruffled some feathers among European politicians with his high-profile criticism of the European Union's performance on COVID vaccination in his New York Times column, A very European disaster 03/20/2021 (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette link).

Krugman concludes his column melodramatically, "The European project is in deep trouble."

But saying "the European project is in deep trouble" about the EU is similar to describing the United States as "the American experiment." Any historic "experiment" can fail, e.g., the Soviet Union. The EU has a long and complicated history. I think it's tempting for Americans to think of the EU as some kind of parallel to the US. And that's not entirely wrong. Luuk van Middelaar in his history of the EU, Vom Kontinent zur Union: Gegenwart und Geschichte des vereinten Europa (2016), discusses the formation of the American Constitution as a reference point for the development of the EU.

But it's a reference point that presents both parallels and contrasts. The EU is an international organization, not a nation-state. It's more than a free-trade area, it's a political union, but it's a supranational institution, not a federal state. This Carleton University website takes a Mugwump position on the nature of the EU, but one that's probably as close as political theory can get right now, as something more closely tied together than a confederation but not so closely united as a federation. (Is the EU a federation or a confederation? n/d)

Krugman is an economist - a Nobel Prize-winning one at that - and he gave intense attention to the euro crisis including the  the Greek crisis of 2015. I think Krugman's basic criticisms of the euro's problems are right. The eurozone was not constructed as an "optimum currency area (OCA)." Having a common currency in a real sense makes the eurozone a single economy in the way that the EU as a whole is not. So, as Krugman and others have described, parts of the eurozone where productivity grows more slowly are forced into destructive austerity policies in the absence of compensating macroeconomic policy at the eurozone level.

Krugman's criticism of the EU's pandemic response includes the following.

Europe's vaccination debacle will almost surely end up causing thousands of unnecessary deaths. And the continent's policy bungles don't look like isolated instances, a few bad decisions made by a few bad leaders.

Instead, the failures seem to reflect fundamental flaws in the continent's institutions and attitudes--including the same bureaucratic and intellectual rigidity that made the euro crisis a decade ago far worse than it should have been.

This strikes me as a criticism founded in an assumption the EU has constructed what was supposed to be a unified health care system. And that's just not the case. In the case of the euro, a subset of the EU nations constructed a common institution with the single currency that did have some "fundamental flaws." But it doesn't seem so reasonable to criticize the absence of institutions (like an EU-wide health system) that the EU has never pretended to have or tried to construct.

Here, I think the analogy of the EU to a nation-state like the US is really problematic. But Krugman has more specific criticisms of the vaccine purchasing process

They seemed deeply worried about the possibility that they might end up paying drug companies too much, or discover that they had laid out money for vaccines that either proved ineffective or turned out to have dangerous side effects.

So they minimized these risks by delaying the procurement process, haggling over prices and refusing to grant liability waivers. They seemed far less worried about the risk that many Europeans might get sick or die because the vaccine rollout was too slow.

I'm inclined to think the purchasing process in the EU, which has been mainly handled at the EU level, was deficient in some way. I haven't followed that process so closely that I could offer a much more detailed analysis at this point. Krugman does allude to the fairly spastic policy of several countries including Germany and France on the AstraZeneca vaccine, which I do think diminished some of the confidence in the vaccine itself. He does seem to be so fixed on the idea that austerity thinking distorts European policy that he may be too inclined to blame stinginess for the problem.

And I found this point to be a real head-scratcher:

Finally, Europe turns out to have a problem with widespread hostility to science. So do we--but theirs is different, in ways that are doing a lot of harm.

In America, most--although by no means all--hostility to science comes from the right, especially the religious right. We're a nation full of anti-evolutionists, climate change deniers and, more recently, covid deniers--forms of science denial that are much less common in Europe. But other anti-scientific attitudes, less easily placed on a left-right spectrum, are distressingly widespread.

Reluctance to take a covid-19 vaccine, even if available, is hardly unknown here, but anti-vaccine sentiment appears to be alarmingly broad in Europe, especially in France.

I don't really know what he's talking about here. Far-right parties and sects have promoted anti-vaxxer notions and bizarre conspiracy theories around COVID. The more specific influence of the QAnon conspiracy has been notable in Europe, too, notably in Austria and Germany. So far as I'm aware, the COVID conspiracy mongers seem overwhelmingly "brown" rather than "green" in the EU.

There will hopefully be a lot of studies - and policy changes based on them - as the COVID pandemic comes under better control for what worked well and what didn't. There does seem to be something to the idea that countries with a stronger collective sense of social responsibility like China including Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea. But aside from the fact that such broad "cultural" factors are extremely difficult to quantity and not exactly easy to export.

I haven't noticed any clear inclination that the particular types of health insurance or public-vs.-private organization of the delivery systems has made a dramatic difference in the response, although systems of universal insurance that produce generally better public health outcomes almost surely have had some influence on survival rates.

It does seem that countries that for whatever reason had structures in place to rapidly disseminate vaccines as such did better. Israel has been on a relatively high level of military alert basically since its founding, part of which means that they were prepared to rapidly distribute medical supplies like gas masks and vaccines. Israel has 9.1 million people, the same population size of Austria, which has been much less efficient in getting people vaccinating.

Chile with 19 million people has a much bigger geographic area than Israel and achieved a faster vaccination rate than Israel. In an analysis of Chile's experience (Impfweltmeister Chile Makroskop 23.03.2021), Jens Holst focuses on Chile's relatively recent experience in vaccination campaigns against epidemics, a general emphasis on primary health care in their system, and a high rate of acceptance of vaccination among the public. Somehow, anti-vaxxer sentiment doesn't seem to have gained much of a following there. Chile has relied on the Chinese vaccines Sinovac und CanSino along with AstroZeneca and Johnson & Johnson.

If Krugman is upset about the EU not being more loosey-goosey about their vaccine bidding, I wonder what he thinks about the Chilean approach. As Holst describes it (my translation from German):

However, the terms of the contracts are not known in Chile … Prices remain secret in the South American country, and no one knows the clauses, and in particular the limitations of liability imposed by manufacturers, who usually travel with dozens of lawyers and, if possible, exclude all financial risks. However, President [Sebastian] Piñera, who knows the other side all too well, could not take this into account. He seized the unique opportunity to present himself as a do-er after his government had created a very bad image for itself, and not only in dealing with the pandemic. For years, his liberal-conservative government has been under massive political pressure, and protests against social inequality, the expensive education system, and the lack of participation of large groups of the population in economic growth have continued despite corona restrictions. Then comes a successful vaccination campaign eight months before the next scheduled presidential election.