The European Commission's vaccine debacle - the escalation of a commercial dispute with a single company into an international incident involving one of the union's most sensitive borders - has masked a deeper vaccine problem for the EU as a whole: the lack of follow-through.
And that is not really the European Commission's fault. It is not built to do what is being asked of it - to act swiftly to ramp up an industry to respond to a public health crisis, spending whatever it takes along the way.
Instead it is a hyper-cautious organisation that moves by finding carefully worked out consensus among member states. It is expected to live within a small budget (around 2.5% of all government sector spending in Europe), and is habitually whipped
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