Wednesday, January 6, 2021 I already mentioned in my first post this year about the EU's miserable failure to buy COVID-19 vaccines (as compared to the U.S., Canada, the UK, Israel, and Bahrain), primarily because the French government didn't want the EU to buy too many doses from non-French companies. That scandal now has a far higher profile, with two of the three parties in Merkel's governing coalition already having voiced criticism in public. Many politicians and reporters in other EU member states haven't understood the significance of this yet. Even France itself will suffer far more from the consequences of Macron's worst initiative than it ever stood to gain.