Interesting. To be honest, I’d gotten almost the opposite impression regarding our throwing-money-at-it phase. Here is one article (found recently with Google, but it seems fairly representative of the sort of things I have been reading about our vaccine acquisition):
Just as thousands of Brits were lining up to get Pfizer’s mRNA COVID-19 vaccine yesterday, a troubling question emerged in the U.S.: Did the United States government fail to lock in enough doses of the vaccine to ensure a broad and quick rollout here?
The short answer appears to be yes.
Pfizer struck a deal with the U.S. government for 100 million doses of its COVID vaccine over the summer, but when the company offered more, [the US] administration declined, according to anonymous sources who spoke to the New York Times.
...
Pfizer and BioNTech went on to lock up supply pacts with other countries. They struck a deal with the U.K. government for 30 million doses in July, and in November nabbed a contract with the European Union for 300 million doses, promising the first deliveries by the end of the year.
It sounds like maybe our throwing-money-at-it phase was #4 (we did badly but other people did even worse), which has led our distribution phase to be #5 (we’re doing badly but we have enough of a head start that we’re still doing better than most)?
Notably, the article you quote cites the US as doing more poorly than the UK, one of the only large countries to outperform the US in both your rankings. I agree that I’ve seen a number of articles in that vein, but none of them seem to compare the US to countries other than Israel and the UK.
Interesting. To be honest, I’d gotten almost the opposite impression regarding our throwing-money-at-it phase. Here is one article (found recently with Google, but it seems fairly representative of the sort of things I have been reading about our vaccine acquisition):
It sounds like maybe our throwing-money-at-it phase was #4 (we did badly but other people did even worse), which has led our distribution phase to be #5 (we’re doing badly but we have enough of a head start that we’re still doing better than most)?
I think korin43 has it right.
Notably, the article you quote cites the US as doing more poorly than the UK, one of the only large countries to outperform the US in both your rankings. I agree that I’ve seen a number of articles in that vein, but none of them seem to compare the US to countries other than Israel and the UK.
In comparison with the EU however, US vaccine procurement looks incredible. I’ll cite a relatively neutral google news search (https://www.google.com/search?q=EU+vaccine+procurement&hl=en&source=lnms&tbm=nws). For future readers: at the moment this shows many news sources saying things like “why has EU procurement been so bad”.