Where does the buck stop in the EU? There’s been plenty of finger pointing as Europeans try to figure out why their own vaccination efforts lag so far behind much of the rest of the world. In many ways, the EU’s failure to produce an adequate supply of its vaccine is the kind of cataclysmic social failure that seems to indict entire regimes, not simply individual actors. No one is powerful enough to produce such a multifaceted failure on their own.
Yet much of the blame and anger has deservedly settled on European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. To oust her, as former European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker recently demanded, would be understandable given her blind trust in free market forces to administer Europe’s vaccination efforts and flailing attempts to make up for the resulting shortages.
