There are a lot of things not true in your comment; I will point out a few things:
The EMA did not get any additional power delegated to it by Merkel or anybody else. Maybe you are talking about the joint vaccine procurement by the European Commission? An instrument that does actually allow EU member states to purchase additional vaccines.
If you are talking about EMA: the EMA does not even disallow countries from using other vaccines not approved by the EMA (Hungary is using Sputnik V for example).
The EU is not a "hotbed of excess politicians who've been "early retired"". That might have been true on some level in the past but everybody has realized for quite some time that the EU has real powers and people want those jobs. There are many young MEPs and very competent members of the European Commission.
We are not witnessing incompetence: Vaccine production is very difficult and the EU is not running a nationalistic scheme like the US or the UK who are not exporting any vaccines whatsoever. In four-five months most adult people in the EU will have the chance to be vaccinated. That's an enormous success story. Other developed countries don't have any significant amount of vaccines at all. All western countries with vaccines (except for US and UK) only have them because of the EU.
I think any kind of arbitrary bans on exports are unjustified really.
Not entirely familiar with how the US is handling the vaccine - are they banning exports of the vaccine which were funded by or purchased by foreign countries? Or are they just saying they're not allowed to make any new deals?
The EMA did not get any additional power delegated to it by Merkel or anybody else. Maybe you are talking about the joint vaccine procurement by the European Commission? An instrument that does actually allow EU member states to purchase additional vaccines.
If you are talking about EMA: the EMA does not even disallow countries from using other vaccines not approved by the EMA (Hungary is using Sputnik V for example).
The EU is not a "hotbed of excess politicians who've been "early retired"". That might have been true on some level in the past but everybody has realized for quite some time that the EU has real powers and people want those jobs. There are many young MEPs and very competent members of the European Commission.
We are not witnessing incompetence: Vaccine production is very difficult and the EU is not running a nationalistic scheme like the US or the UK who are not exporting any vaccines whatsoever. In four-five months most adult people in the EU will have the chance to be vaccinated. That's an enormous success story. Other developed countries don't have any significant amount of vaccines at all. All western countries with vaccines (except for US and UK) only have them because of the EU.