The EU beat COVID and ditched Russian energy. Now it must learn to live without US security help
The EU beat COVID and ditched Russian energy. Now it must learn to live without US security help
The European Union is getting good at adapting to unprecedented circumstances. Over the last five years, the 27 member countries have pulled together to fund the purchase of tens of millions of vaccines and devised a massive recovery fund to resuscitate economies ravaged by the pandemic.
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It did not “beat COVID”. COVID is not over. People are dying and being disabled by it every day.
Beating COVID would have mean actually taking it seriously, maybe eradicting it, atleast having the vast majority of people vaccinate, mask and properly ventilate.
If anything we’re worse than the start of the pandemic now. A third of europe believes in anti-vaccine conspiracies.
COVID will stay here because we can't kill a virus like this without a major world-wide vaccine like we did with Smallpox and Measles.
We still have the bubonic plague. It only impacts 20 people a year, but it's still a disease, centuries after the black death. We still haven hundreds of thousands of people die of Tuberculosis every year, namely in countries that are under Neo-colonalism.
COVID cannot be beaten unless we hyperfocus on it. And we probably never will. Governments both "better" and evil ignored it and started not documenting/publicly showing the infection rates because it looked bad for re-election/government action.
Europe didn't beat COVID, because it's not up to one country or a continent to beat it, it would have to be a major world focus with the WHO.
Anyone saying otherwise is a fool who wants to ignore public health problems because it makes them money or thinks they'll be immune to health problems that doesn't care who you are, just your species.
you would think that millions of dead and millions suffering from long-covid would be enough incentive to actually focus on providing available vaccines to everybody, even for bourgeois "democracies"...
Did Europe not provide COVID vaccines to their citizens? Even in the healthcare hell that is the US the vaccines were free.
They also needed to provide COVID vaccines to those countries that couldn’t afford to buy them themselves in order to successfully eradicate it.
But they couldn’t do that because it would look bad with the voters if there weren’t enough vaccines to use at home.
This, plus, the vaccines were mostly developed with public money/university grants, but for the last 10-20% companies took the rights, made it for-profit and put it under patent to prevent the world from gaining immunity.
The example of the polio vaccine should be standard procedure
If they could read any critcism of Europe/liberalism without treating it as a personal attack, they might understand that we got rid of polio due to a lack of profit from the inventors. COVID will probably never have that until millions more are dead from it.
Beating COVID would have mean actually taking it seriously, maybe eradicting it, atleast having the vast majority of people vaccinate, mask and properly ventilate.
By all of those metrics, save for total eradication of course, Europe largely DID beat covid, or rather the most critical phase of it, unlike the US.
Last I checked, covid infections are below pre-covid flu infections in most of Europe, as is seasonal flu. Again, unlike the US.
If anything we’re worse than the start of the pandemic now
The entire world is, due mainly to the by now worldwide resurgence of fascism.
A third of europe believes in anti-vaccine conspiracies.
See above.
It didn't ditch Russian energy either.