Joe Biden hollered, "America is back" at his appearance at the G-7.  The fawning media beat their flippers together like trained seals, and G-7 chieftains made lots of blathery statements.

But under the surface, at the policy level, things looked a little different. It wasn't just that Italy was in bed with China, fully signed on to its Belt and Road initiative, or that Germany was in hock to Putin.

Biden's loudly stated proposal to hand out a billion vaccines to third-world countries left Europe's G-7 members and those European nations beyond feeling kind of sour.

According to some buried news in the Daily Beast:

The G7 announced that it would donate a billion vaccines to the developing world, but most of Europe is still unvaccinated after the EU struggled early on with its vaccine rollout—no EU country is yet close to herd immunity. Biden denied that any pressure had been applied to the European leaders to agree.

"Our vaccine donations don't include pressure for favors or potential concessions," he said. "We're doing this to save lives, to end this pandemic, that's it."

Whatever the motivation, the U.S. and U.K. have been eager to urge EU and other G7 countries to donate vaccines they essentially don't have for their own citizens to poorer countries. "Biden certainly ruffled feathers on his vaccine announcement," Dennison said. "EU leaders would have liked to have been consulted."

Sure, the U.S. is awash in excess vaccines now and probably ought to be giving them away...to someone.  But why the hell aren't we donating them to unvaxxed Europe, which has been having some problems with some of its vaccines and can't get its act together to get its locals vaccinated?  The impact of the vaccine giveaway to ungrateful third-world nations that contributed nothing to their development has to be going down badly in Europe where lockdowns are continuing harsh and severe.  Imagine paying in various ways, if for nothing else, through high taxes, for vaccine development efforts — and seeing them handed for free to third-world nations first?  Think how that must be going down in Italy or Spain, both of which lost so many of their old people.  One can see the issue there.

Notice also that Team Biden acted unilaterally there, seemingly making the G-7 European states go along, which somehow happened, despite Biden's own on-display senility there.  Biden's puppet-masters seem to be powerful.

The BBC notes that the vaccine distribution, by an organization in Africa, is likely to be a mess.  Vaccines are likely to expire before they can be distributed, for one.

Notice also from the BBC report that the U.S. and U.K. are to deliver the lion's share — 600 million doses, with the other G-7 nations pledging a mere 54 million of their own. 

Why wouldn't that be an issue?  The Europeans remain unvaccinated, while the U.S. is seeing its excess vaccine spoil.  Aren't the Europeans allies?  Shouldn't they come first?

Even on economic grounds, it makes sense, in the same way that, on an airplane that's depressurizing, you put your own mask on first before helping someone else.  Aren't the Europeans paying an unusually stiff price in lost productivity due to lockdowns?  It's one thing to vaxx a person living in a grass hut or fourth-world shantytown; it's quite another for someone who could be contributing to, say, France's high GDP as a highly educated project manager or machine operator, but is unable to, due to lockdown, to wait another year in lockdown in order to get vaccinated.  From a money standpoint, it makes sense to get Europe back on its feet rather than the Third World, if for nothing else, then so that Europe can contribute to the indigent.

There's very little press on this — I scanned the websites of various European places — but there's something funny about this, this obsession with taking it all to an NGO in Africa, making one wonder if it's some kind of corrupt Hunter Biden scheme in Biden's Third-World-first bull-through.  It's bound to be causing murmurs.  It's probably a bigger story than it looks.

Image: Pixabay, Pixabay License.

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