DISINFO: EU countries failed to provide help Italy in 2020, only Russia and Cuba did
SUMMARY
The management by the European Union of the sanitary crisis, was a disaster from A to Z, remember when Italy was at its worst there was no European aid but the aid came from Russia and Cuba and not from other European Union countries. And Germany did not initially want to welcome patients from other countries of the European Union. It did not want to transfer a respirator and so on the period of the theft of masks … At the start of the Epidemic, it was a disaster and it is again a disaster now because for management of the vaccine, the EU is lagging behind everyone and in particular the UK which gives a memorable lesson to the EU, but also the United States and Israel and many countries in the Middle East. The EU is lagging behind because they took a long time to contract, and the states have failed in logistics.
RESPONSE
A recurrent narrative about the lack of solidarity inside the EU, in particular, to help Italy during the coronavirus epidemic. The narrative has been repeatedly debunked dozens of times in the spring of 2020.
The European Commission took multiple initiatives to help Italy and other member states deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, including support to the economy. Read more about the common European response to coronavirus here.
Individual EU members have also provided assistance to Italy specifically, including access to a hundred intensive care beds (Austria and Germany), 500 mobile medical units (Greece), 2.5 million masks (Austria and France), 30,000 protective suits (the Czech Republic and France), 300 ventilators (Germany), as well as 50 medical personnel (Poland, Romania, and non-member Norway).
The European Union has also adopted a major recovery plan for Europe, to help repair the economic and social damage brought by the coronavirus pandemic.
The claim that the EU was slower to start vaccinating its population than the US or Israel is true but it has many factors and the bottleneck is the production capacities as Politico explains: The issue now is largely to do with manufacturing bottlenecks and countries being unprepared to roll out the jabs quickly.
It is also true that the U.K. and U.S. were able to vaccinate hundreds of thousands of people before European regulators approved the first coronavirus vaccine. There are a few reasons for this, most notably that the European Medicines Agency recommended a conditional marketing authorisation, which comes with more strings attached for pharmaceutical companies than the British emergency authorisation procedures.
Read similar cases claiming that Italy is alone defending itself from coronavirus, without any help from hypocritical EU and that the EU left Italy face to face with an invisible and terrible enemy.