While I agree with the sentiment, don‘t forget the elephant in the room is vaccine supply. It‘s just not arbitrarily scaleable and most vaccination centers in my EU country are sitting around idle.
What some describe as smart moves by Israel is also rather selfish. It’s made possible by the fact that they are a rather small country that has a large support by major powers for historical reasons, but they made a pact with the devil here: They simply outbid everyone so the vaccine goes to them INSTEAD somewhere else (including Palestine). They sold all kinds of patient data on top in order to get where they are now.
Vaccinating the 100x larger EU is simply a different beast. If the EU had been as "smart" as Israel here and bid as much, don‘t forget we‘d all be stuck at 5% vaccination speaking in absolute numbers of vaccine availability.
They got the deal by quickly offering Pfizer and Moderna (not the devil) whatever they asked: More money (but ~$40 instead of ~$20 per dose is trivial, to both sides), indemnification, and data.
Israel vaccination speed is not only due to price. Israel was the first to order vaccines even before any published results. Israel is geographically small and has medium-low sized population which helps in logistics and effectiveness.
I think there was a lot of skepticism in Europe initially regarding the vaccine while in Israel the demand was very high from the get-go.
That is really smart risk management. Even if they overplayed and even if the vaccines turned out to be garbage, the price is small compared to costs of lockdowns
What some describe as smart moves by Israel is also rather selfish. It’s made possible by the fact that they are a rather small country that has a large support by major powers for historical reasons, but they made a pact with the devil here: They simply outbid everyone so the vaccine goes to them INSTEAD somewhere else (including Palestine). They sold all kinds of patient data on top in order to get where they are now.
Vaccinating the 100x larger EU is simply a different beast. If the EU had been as "smart" as Israel here and bid as much, don‘t forget we‘d all be stuck at 5% vaccination speaking in absolute numbers of vaccine availability.