The EU’s Big Pandemic Failure Isn't About Money
This has been a crisis of health-care cooperation, not cash.
Protective gear shouldn’t be lacking at a time like this.
Photographer: Aris Oikonomou/AFP via Getty Images
A “great day for European solidarity” is how Germany’s finance minister described last week’s $590 billion euro-area virus rescue package, clinched even as Europe’s North and South haggle over the cost of cleaning up the economic wreckage left by Covid-19. The package would allow countries to borrow from the euro region’s rescue fund, the European Stability Mechanism, for health-care spending without policy constraints, up to a certain amount.
The focus on money is understandable, given the looming recession that’s expected to be deeper than the crisis of 2008. But it obscures a glaring failure of the European Union that may have made both the human and financial cost of the pandemic worse: A lack of coordination and collaboration in health-care policy.