During the second wave of the virus, from the last quarter of 2020 through the first half of 2021, the European excess mortality rate was 51.5 percent lower than in the United States. During the second half of 2021 this difference widened to 83 percent. Yet in 2021 the Americans had access to more vaccine doses, sooner, than the Europeans did.18 At this stage, a fundamental difference was vaccine uptake.
