Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic

by Scott Gottlieb

Friendly nations like Canada and Australia refused to ship to the US vaccine that had been purchased by our government and manufactured at our behest but made at facilities in those two nations. Only after Canada had satisfied the needs of its own citizens did it allow American products to flow to the US for American patients.20 With COVID, the same behaviors would reoccur. Italy exercised its export control regulations under European Union rules to block the shipment of 250,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine that was bound for Australia, on the grounds that Australia had controlled its epidemic and was in less immediate need of the doses.21 It was the first time that these EU regulations had ever been invoked.22 A few weeks later, the EU implemented new emergency legislation that gave it broad powers to curb exports of COVID vaccines that were manufactured in facilities located in member nations. The rules hit Britain especially hard, since the country was far ahead of other European nations in vaccinating its population at the time and was dependent on shipments from other European countries to keep up its vaccination campaign.23 The European Union was putting its interests first. The same tenets influenced US policy. In May 2021, even as the US developed a surplus of COVID vaccine—stockpiling as many as 100 million vaccine doses by the beginning of the month—the Biden administration wouldn’t allow those doses to be shipped to Brazil, which was experiencing an uncontro...