The European Union’s troubled COVID-19 vaccine rollout by Jacob Funk Kirkegaard published by PIIE (3/2021).
“The European Union and its citizens have long benefited from generally well-funded government health systems and an advanced pharmaceutical sector. Why, then, has Europe found it so hard to quickly immunize its population and reduce the level of COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations? This critical failure stems partly from the institutional set-up of the European Union, which hampered efforts to obtain vaccines, and partly from the different healthcare practices among EU member states, which slowed coordination of the best rollout practices…”
Novel viral variants: Why the world should prepare for chronic pandemics by Monica de Bolle published by PIIE (2/2021)
Even with the alarming spread of variants of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 (short for coronavirus disease 2019), most economists, most policymakers, and perhaps most people have been assuming that at some point the pandemic will end, and life will resume as before. But what if it does not? Experience with HIV/AIDS and other precedents indicates that these disease events can turn from acute to chronic without going away. The reason lies in the extraordinary mix of virus characteristics, medical science, an interdependent global population, ease of global travel, social behavior, and political missteps and miscalculations—a mix that also caused SARS-CoV-2 to spread so quickly in our globalized era…”
