Unsurprisingly, the E.U.’s medical regulator said Thursday that it believed AstraZeneca’s vaccine was “safe and effective.” For all the talk about the E.U.’s belief in adequate “precautions,” the risk-management calculations in suspending the AstraZeneca vaccine make little sense. ADADFor the European Union, whose identity was forged and tested in a series of political and economic crises in recent years, the vaccine fiasco will prove the most threatening of all. For some inexplicable reason, European leaders do not seem to share that sense of urgency, and they are also trapped in a bureaucratic structure in which immediate action is anathema, if not altogether impossible. From the beginning, the AstraZeneca vaccine has been unjustly maligned by European leaders, including, notably, French President Emmanuel Macron, who claimed — with no evidence whatsoever — that it was less effective for older people. ADADThe quick suspension of the AstraZeneca vaccine across the E.U.

Source: Washington Post March 18, 2021 21:25 UTC