I can give my perspective as someone who was born in Canada but spent most of my adult life in Israel.

Currently my parents are in Canada, both in their 70s and still have no idea when the vaccine will be available to them whereas I am in Israel in my late 30s and I had my second dose of the Pfizer vaccine over a month ago.

The difference between the countries is startling. Yes Israel paid more money for the vaccine and agreed to share anonymized information with Pfizer. The math checked out (cost of closure vs vaccine) so it made sense. The fact that some countries focused on price negotiation vs mass vaccinations astounds me as each day a country is in lockdown costs billions of dollars. But I am not going to focus on that aspect.

What I am going to talk about is how Canada and Israel managed the crisis.

In Israel the general trend is to not really overthink things. This is perfect when there is a crisis and decisions need to be made fast. For instance when the virus started Israel was one of the first countries, outside of Italy and China, to implement a strict closure.
Another habit Israelis have is to bend or flat out break the rules as they are in general very skeptical of anything the government does. This can also be important during the handling of a crisis, as some rules can get in the way of finding a solution faster. But this also has a downside. For instance after a few weeks of closure in which very few people died, a large chunk of Israelis started to ignore the closure rules.

Canada on the other hand was very slow to implement a closure but when they did the population was quick to listen and from my understanding continue to follow the rules the government set a year later.

Now to the vaccine program, when it became clear that Israel bet on the wrong vaccine, the PM called the CEO of Pfizer 30 times and agreed to pay way more just to get the vaccine faster. Our government, which is normally very slow to move, was able to arrange the funding for this within a few days. When the vaccine arrived in Israel - the government with the healthcare companies (Israel has public healthcare, but it is managed by 4 private companies) implemented a plan within days to distribute the vaccine to the entire population. The plan was intentionally simple with a very simple criteria of who is eligible and who is not (over this age - yes, under this age - no, healthcare worker - yes, at risk - yes). There was also some innovation in that they were the first country to repackage the vaccines so they could be distributed in smaller amounts to places like nursing homes or small communities (this entire process had to be done in a freezer).

Remember when I said Israelis break the rules? Well an interesting thing started to happen. At the end day, if there were vaccines that would need to be thrown out, nurses took it upon themself to give leftover vaccines to whoever would take it. They didn’t wait or ask for permission they just did what needed to be done. There were even reports of nurses walking out and pulling people off of sidewalks to come and get vaccinated. This of course didn’t last very long. Within days there were Facebook groups, not managed by any official organization, but by individual Israelis, that were publishing the location of clinics with leftover doses that need to be used by days end. Now the entire country was mobilized as part of the vaccine effort and this meant that very few doses were wasted. You see in Israel, they treated the vaccine effort like a war and that meant mobilizing the population, a clear goal, fast decision making and accepting that the one in the field (the doctors and nurses) have some freedom to make decisions that will lead to the goals being achieved. I don’t think this was a conscious choice, it’s just part of the countries DNA.

Contrast to Canada - when they got the vaccine, it sat in freezers while they discussed who would get it first. They didn’t focus on mass distribution and instead focused on making the most correct decision (which of course leads to no decision). It was compounded by the fact that each province created their own distribution plan, often based on a long complex set of criteria. Now maybe it did happen, but I don’t see it being nearly as likely that a nurse in Canada would take it upon him or herself to distribute the vaccine to those that don’t fit the official criteria, even if it meant throwing out vaccines at the end of the day. Canada didn’t take a war footing when it came to the vaccine distribution program.

Now let me make something clear - a lot of the things that made the vaccine program a success here, are also the things that cause the biggest headaches during normal times and a lot of the things that made it a relative failure in Canada are what make Canada great (over planning vs under planning for instance). Had the vaccine taken another year, I think Canada would have ended up in a much better position than Israel did.

I suspect the EU is much more like Canada and possibly even worse. My impression of the EU these days is that they do not take problems seriously until it’s too late. The writing is always on the wall, but they are very slow to move.

There are a lot of good things about the EU too. But in a real crisis I want to be somewhere that knows how to make quick decisions.