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.

Everyday Republican ghoulishness on the COVID-19 pandemic

Rightwing Republican Sen. Ron Johnson made his case that mass deaths from corona virus are no big deal in a USA Today column titled, As we learn more about the coronavirus, try to put things into perspective 03/30/2020.

Johnson clearly tries to minimize the seriousness of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States:

Each year, approximately 48,000 Americans commit suicide and an estimated 67,000 die of a drug overdose. That level of individual despair has occurred in a strong economy with near-record low levels of unemployment in virtually every demographic.

Imagine the potential psychological and human toll if this shutdown continues indefinitely, unemployment reaches 20% or higher, as some now predict, and we sink into a deep recession or depression. ...

Every premature death is a tragedy, but death is an unavoidable part of life. More than 2.8 million die each year — nearly 7,700 a day. The 2017-18 flu season was exceptionally bad, with 61,000 deaths attributed to it. Can you imagine the panic if those mortality statistics were attributed to a new virus and reported nonstop?

Once again, I'm reminded of Steve Earle's protest song, "Amerika v. 6.0 (The Best We Can Do)::

Yeah, I know, that sucks that your HMO
Ain't doin' what you thought it would do
But everybody's gotta die sometime and we can't save everybody
It's the best that we can do

The first time I recall hearing a politician make this kind of argument was from then-Vice President Spiro Agnew, who brushed off antiwar critics' citing of American deaths in the Vietnam Ware by saying that more people were killed in traffic accidents in the US every year than the total number of Americans being killed in traffic accidents every year.

The argument didn't really catch on. Because even simpletons can grasp the difference between deliberate, systematic killing in war and many thousands of discreet accidents. Some war critics no doubt noticed that the number of Vietnamese dead were left out of Agnew's comparison. But even war fans were more focused on the sacrificial value of those Americans who died in combat. And the military, of course, has a moral obligation to honor the combat dead as well as a very practical reason for doing so. If people regard soldiers dying in war as pointless loss, they aren't likely to cheer for the wars or encourage family members to enlist.

Chris Hayes did a book based on his own experiences covering armed conflicts called War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002). As the title implies, it focuses heavily on how people are motivated to fight, kill, and sacrifice themselves in war. "War finds its meaning in death," he wrote. "The cause is built on the backs of victims, portrayed always as innocent. Indeed, most conflicts are ignited with martyrs, whether real or created." And the number of soldiers or innocent civilians lost in a war become the justification for continuing the war. "The cause, sanctified by the dead, cannot be questioned without dishonoring those who gave up their lives."

That's why it's rare to see a politician sluffing off the significance of combat deaths, as Agnew did. And politicians who did not serve in the military, or who like Donald Trump made real effort not to do so in the case of conscription during the Vietnam War, are more likely to go out of their way to praise and idolize soldiers and those killed in war, at least in their public statements.

But deaths from COVID-19? It's hard for people to imagine those as patriotic sacrifices. The combat dead of the First World War were honored by their fellow citizens as patriotic sacrifices and remembered as heroes. The victims of the "Spanish" flu epidemic at the end of the war were unfortunate, tragic deaths to be mourned.

So when Sen. Johnson and other Republicans, including the Mad King Trump himself, seek to minimize the seriousness of COVID-19 deaths, they are being callous and morbid. But they don't risk drawing immediate charges of being unpatriotic the way someone dismissed the soldiers lost in a current war would be.

The crassly partisan motives of Republicans for doing so is not hard to see. Trump has been downplaying the significance of the virus and has been recklessly irresponsible in his statements about it and his formal policy responses to it. On February 26, he made this remarkable statement, “Because of all we’ve done, the risk to the American people remains very low. ... When you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero. That’s a pretty good job we’ve done." [my emphasis] And that is only one example among many. (Aaron Blake, Timeline: Trump’s efforts to downplay the coronavirus threat Washington Post 03/31/2020)

This MSNBC Deadline report contrasts Trumps's panicky backtracking in his daily (de facto) campaign press conference yesterday, April 1. Trump’s Revisionist History On Coronavirus 04/01/2020:

Given Trump's April 1 warning that we could be seeing 100,000 to 240,000 COVID-19 deaths, maybe Sen. Ron Johnson will share with us what to him would be an acceptable US body count of deaths over the next year under which no special measures are justified.

Some reporter should also ask Sen. Johnson whether the body count for the flu that he seems to consider a purely natural result might be affected by a health insurance system which provides universal coverage so that everyone can get prompt treatment when they get flu symptoms instead of opting to tough it out for fear of getting hammered with unpayable hospital bills.

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As we see from the following two articles, both by Eric Litke, the Johnson article was cited by The Intellectualist with the headline, "Americans Should Go Back To Work, Because ‘Death Is An Unavoidable Part Of Life.’" Ironically, The concluding lines on the two Litke articles are different, too:

• Fact check: Did Wisconsin senator say Americans should go back to work? USA Today 04/01/2020: "We rate this a False Headline."
•   Did Ron Johnson say Americans should go back to work because “death is an unavoidable part of life?” PolitiFact 04/01/2020: "We rate this Half True."

It's not cited in the Litke articles, but Business Insider also ran a story by Joseph Zeballos-Roig titled, GOP senator calls on Trump to reopen parts of the coronavirus-stricken economy because 'death is an unavoidable part of life' 03/31/2020.

"I woke up this morning and none of the news was good"

Steve Earle has a song called "Jerusalem" whose opening line is, "I woke up this morning and none of the news was good". I get that feeling every morning looking at the news on the coronavirus crisis in the US.

David Kessler argues that we're having a kind of mass grieving. I can't say his interview is particularly upbeat. But he does have some worthwile things to say. He makes an interesting point about how people in areas where funerals are not currently allowed may need to find ways to hold "virtual funerals," which he says he would never in a million years have advocated befire this particular crisis.

"We Are Grieving the World We Have Now Lost" Says a Grief Expert Amanpour and Company 03/27/2020

Trump's continuing scam, the COVID-19 crisis, and critics' desperate to believe the situation isn't as bad as it looks

Peter Wehner writes, "Trump’s success as a politician has been built on his ability to impose his will and narrative on others, to use his experience on a reality-television show and his skill as a con man to shape public impressions in his favor, even—or perhaps, especially — if those impressions are at odds with reality." (The President is Trapped The Atlantic ß3/25/2020)

One big mistake the Democrats made in campaigning against Trump in 2016 was to smugly assume that Trump's professional-wrestling style of politicking couldn't win him the Presidency. Wehner continues, "He convinced a good chunk of the country that he is a wildly successful businessman," which he wasn't. Now that he has essentially $4.5 trillion dollars that he can allocate to pretty much any companies he wants including his own, maybe he will finally make his business fabulously successful.

But being a lucky and unscrupulous grifter isn't the same as being the business genius he claimed to be. David Cay Johnston has been telling anyone who would listen for years that Trump was a mobster and a scamster, not a brilliant business titan.

Wehner continues that sentence by saying that Trump's persuasion of "a good chunk of the country" also extended to conning them into thinking that he "knows more about campaign finance, the Islamic State, the courts, the visa system, trade, taxes, the debt, renewable energy, infrastructure, borders, and drones than anyone else."

And Wehner predicts that as the COVID-19 crisis proceeds:

Trump’s hallmarks will be even more fully on display. The president will create new scapegoats. He’ll blame governors for whatever bad news befalls their states. He’ll berate reporters who ask questions that portray him in a less-than-favorable light. He’ll demand even more cultlike coverage from outlets such as Fox News. Because he doesn’t tolerate relationships that are characterized by disagreement or absence of obeisance, before long we’ll see key people removed or silenced when they try to counter a Trump-centered narrative. He’ll try to find shiny objects to divert our attention from his failures. [my emphasis]

Unfortunately, Wehner's piece reflects a lot of the weaknesses the American commentariat has displayed in dealing with Trump's Malicious Orange Clown Show. He presents Trump's success at selling his con job image of himself as due to Trump's own talent for scamming. Which is part of the story.

But there is a great deal of the story to which Beltway media types don't want to call attention. One of those factors is the corporate media itself. CBS Executive Chairman and CEO Leslie Moonvies described his view of the Trump campaign at a media conference in early 2016 (Paul Bond, Leslie Moonves on Donald Trump: "It May Not Be Good for America, but It's Damn Good for CBS" Hollywood Reporter 02/29/2016):

"It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS," he said of the presidential race.

Moonves called the campaign for president a "circus" full of "bomb throwing," and he hopes it continues.

"Most of the ads are not about issues. They're sort of like the debates," he said.

"Man, who would have expected the ride we're all having right now? ... The money's rolling in and this is fun," he said.

"I've never seen anything like this, and this going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It's a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going," said Moonves.

"Donald's place in this election is a good thing," he said Monday at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in San Francisco.

"There's a lot of money in the marketplace," the exec said of political advertising so far this presidential season. [my emphasis]

Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as corportate media. And their approach to covering politics is radically different from the classical image of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite that many older Democrats still have in their heads as the normalcy that a successful Make America Boring Again campaign this year would restore.

That doesn't diminish Trump's own success in working that system. He's unmistakably a talented demogogue. But Wehner's article also reflects the very narrow and unrealistic framing of NeverTrumper rightwing Republicans and the Democratic "Resistance" types, which portrays Trump as a unique aberration whose departure from the political scene will somehow restore a lost normal state. The Republican fever will break, conservative Democrats keep telling themselves and the public, year after year, and decade after decade.

The media malfunction, which has very much to do with the business laws that frame the media market, won't go away without serious reforms to the legal framework that currently controls matters such as media concentration.

The political environment that made Trumpism and a President Trump possible is one of asymmetric partisan polarization in a system in which essentiall all meaningful limits to spending in political campaigns have been aboloished. (On the latter point, I don't mean to imply it can't get worse!) The campaign financing model in the US is a system of legalized bribery in which even illegal bribery and corruption become much harder to detect, deter, and prosecute.

For Democrats - to the extent that they actually want a healthy representative democracy - it's especially important to stop pretending that Trump is akin to a Thanos or Cthulhu dropping in from space. The criminal and anti-democratic aspects of the Trump Presidency were present and on very prominent display during the Bush-Cheney Administration. And the subsequent Obama-Biden Administration gave Cheney's project to establish an authoritarian Unitary Executive system of government the one thing a Republican Administration could never give itself: immunity from prosecution for criminal activity granted by an administration of the other party.