Final Word from Thursday, March 11, 2021

There are of course more than two vaccines for covid-19, but a sort of two-vaccine system is nevertheless taking shape. It's East vs. West, and it's similar to the two-party political system in the U.S., where the underlying principles and goals don't differ much, but each party offers a slightly different approach. The dispute about using the Sputnik V and Sinopharm vaccines isn't so much a battle over vaccines as it is to the approach. As such, it serves the vaccination cause by distracting from the bigger issue of whether inoculation makes sense for a large percentage of the population. The EU decided that the potential reward in an emergency outweighs the potential risk and therefore shortened the normally very long testing period. This doesn't mean the risk disappeared. Healthy, "not old" people are faced with the same decision as the EU of whether the reward outweighs the risk, but their decision-making is fundamentally clouded by the heated debate within the two-vaccine system. [ Czech Republic Russian China Chinese Russia European Union Medicines Agency Democxrats Republicans ]