Problems with COVID-19 vaccine rollouts in the U.S. have made headlines. But, as the old saying goes, the grass isn't always greener on the other side -- even if we're talking about the other side of the Atlantic. European countries are facing some challenges, too. In this Motley Fool Live video recorded on Jan. 13, 2021, healthcare and cannabis bureau chief Corinne Cardina and Fool.com writer Keith Speights discuss how the COVID-19 vaccine rollouts in Europe are going.
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Corinne Cardina: Let's look abroad momentarily. How are things going with the vaccine regulatory and rollout in Europe?
Keith Speights: Well, in Europe, and when we say Europe, we have to differentiate there, Corinne, because you've got the European Union countries and then you've got the United Kingdom, which is no longer part of the European Union. There are two different factors at play there.
In the UK, they have authorized three vaccines thus far. They first started off with the Pfizer (PFE 0.97%)-BioNTech (BNTX 2.33%) vaccine, and then they gave authorization to Moderna's (MRNA 0.97%) vaccine and also AstraZeneca's (AZN 0.71%) vaccine that they developed along with the University of Oxford. The UK has three vaccines that are being rolled out. In the European Union, there are two vaccines, the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine, and Moderna's.
The population of Europe, including the EU countries and the UK combined, is more than 500 million people. They are encountering some of the same kind of issues that the US is having. Some countries have said they don't have enough healthcare workers to get all the vaccines out, they're running behind the schedule they had hoped.
They're even seeing some of the same issues we were just talking about with the federal government in the US and the states having some disconnects there. Well, the European Union is, you can think of that as a federal government in a way with each country like a state. There's been some miscommunication between the EU and the individual countries. They're running into some of those logistical issues. Their process is going slowly, just like in the US. But just as we're seeing in the US things picking up, I think we'll see it pick up in Europe as well.
