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In order to understand why the British were faster in the race for vaccines than the EU, which got off to a difficult start, it is always helpful to take a look back at history, to paraphrase Churchill: “The deeper you look into the past, the further you can see into the future. "

It helps if you can see through the present better.

This is what French President Emmanuel Macron mentioned a few days ago in an often overlooked conversation with the Greek broadcaster ERT.

“All of our experts,” Macron said, “assured us when the corona crisis broke out: never in the history of mankind has a vaccine been developed in less than a year.

We just didn't reach for the stars.

That should be a lesson to all of us.

We were wrong, we lacked ambition, we lacked - let's say - madness, to say: It is possible, let's do it.

The British now have more vaccinations - they had more ambitions than we do. "

Eh bien, Monsieur le President!

It is not for nothing that your nickname is "Jupiter" - the father of gods who thinks himself above the earthly turmoil.

You finally have to see more.

Even if it got pretty late about it.

Not only did you and your German neighbors lack ambition - you even raised doubts about the effectiveness of the vaccine in January, when the AstraZeneca steam train was at full speed on the island (“quasi-inefficient for people over 65 ", They said), then stopped the administration for several weeks and thus risked countless corona victims.

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Meanwhile, the vaccination campaign on the continent is running, albeit slowly, because confidence in AstraZeneca, in vaccination in general, has been destroyed, and the company at the center of the debate is also lagging behind with the production volume.

This will also reduce the UK vaccination rate during April.

Meanwhile, thousands and thousands of ampoules are stored unused in the EU.

Source: WORLD infographic


The Corona crisis has revealed profound differences in mentality, which have grown over time.

The island is a seafaring nation, risks, on shaky ground, are the existential core of their life experience.

They alert the mind much earlier than in societies that seem to live on safe ground.

“Nothing is safe in a sea battle”, Lord Nelson pointed out to his captains on the evening before October 21, 1805, the devastating sea defeat of the French at Trafalgar, “something has to be left to the unpredictable moment”.

An unimaginable motto for a land power whose military is based on reliable marching orders, carefully worked out in organizational terms.

"There are 140 vaccinations per minute in the UK"

Great Britain is far superior to Germany when it comes to corona vaccinations.

WELT correspondent Stefanie Bolzen explains what is going better on the island and why that is no reason to give the all-clear.

Source: WORLD / Felicia Pochhammer

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What was demonstrated at Austerlitz: Only six weeks after Trafalgar, on December 2nd, Napoleon and his troops near the Moravian Brno were able to decide the fortunes of war in his favor.

The "elephant" and the "whale", as Napoleon liked to refer to France and England, went their separate ways.

The elephant's tusks would not be able to get at the whale, he figured success elsewhere.

But the English have historically always stuck to their “madness”, the ambition to defy any risk, even with the lowest chances of success, “against all odds”, as the betting language puts it.

Was there a lower win rate than Churchill's resistance to Hitler in 1940?

The risk of Brexit is still not entirely manageable.

But what is certain is that the nerves of other societies would not have been able to look such a risk in the eyes.

Johnson's dramatic appeal: "Save lives!"

Prime Minister Boris Johnson was initially unsure of his reactions to the Covid-19 crisis.

Then, with the corona deaths rising, enlightenment hit him, and in early May he called Kate Bingham, an Oxford and Harvard biochemistry graduate who had made a name for herself in the private sector as an investment expert in organic companies.

Johnson's reach for the stars: “Save lives, as quickly as possible!” He telephoned, in the manner that is so colloquial even in urgent cases that characterizes business life in Great Britain itself.

He only knew the person called from hearsay.

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The AstraZeneca vaccine was originally discovered at Oxford's Jenner Institute.

Under Kate Bingham's direction, widely networked as she was, further research centers were added, the pool of experts expanded, as did the flow of money.

The government poured billions in tax money, it was not about the cheapest method, but about the fastest and most reliable result.

Hundreds of thousands of test persons were rewarded for this and the manufacturer was also released from product liability - in other words, if the first £ 900 million investment did not continue, the loss would remain with the government.

Under such conditions, the research institutes were able to work free of charge and without any commercial side-effects, the passion - the ambition - drove the process, Kate Bingham also received no salary, only claimed current expenses.

The keyword is risk.

What else did that have to do with capitalism?

Wasn't that “nationalization”, even if not in name?

Johnson, reckless with the tongue, as you know, a person who would risk his reputation for a joke, did just that. He risked a lot when he did this for the best (or worst) in a small group of Tory MPs a few days ago. gave: "The reason why we have this vaccination success is capitalism, greed, my friends."

"Immediately delete from memory"

No sooner had the word escaped from the enclosure of his teeth than he called it back and asked the audience to "erase it from their mind immediately".

Capitalism, greed - those were terms from Oliver Stone's "Wall Street" film from 1987, where the investment monster Gordon Gekko brags to shareholders: "Greed in all its forms - greed for life, for money, for love, for knowledge - has accompanied the upward wave of humanity. "

An extraordinary faux pas: to portray his government's vaccination breakthrough, the head of government falls back on one of the oldest anti-capitalist clichés - the ruthless greed for anything that an egocentric (or a similarly driven nation) can think of.

The ultimate Anglo-Saxon caricature, perfidious Albion in its purest form.

Not only was it a silly joke that Johnson caught in a second — it was utterly inaccurate.

The vaccination breakthrough on Downing Street took place within the framework of a state regulatory structure in which private and public authorities found themselves to be extremely cooperative, in mutual self-interest, on the basis of the state health service.

The promotion of the life sciences with public aid will in future also prove to be a commercial gain for companies in the further fight against infectious diseases, while the state initially put its responsibility for the common good on the table.

That was already the case when huge injections of tax money saved the banking sector from ruin during the 2007/08 financial crisis.

Reaching for the stars - neither German “organizational cretinism” (Rosa Luxemburg) nor French statism, but only the situational “madness” of creativity.

This is where Pericles' immortal phrase fits: "The secret of happiness is freedom, the secret of freedom is courage."

Stefanie Bolzen - "Boris Johnson's optimism is not surprising"

Great Britain wants to lift all corona restrictions by June 21.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said this when he presented his lockdown timetable in the House of Commons.

Where the optimism comes from, says Stefanie Bolzen.

Source: WORLD