Covid-19, a few questions to entrepreneurs.

One thing that stands out in the trend in the availability of anti-covid vaccines is the fact that, despite exporting vaccines and subject to embargoes, Europe is struggling to build production capacity. Not for nothing did we have to wait for BioNtech to build new plants to have regular doses of the vaccine.

But the problem is not only in the production of vaccines: since India closed its borders to all exports of pharmaceuticals, the price of reagents and the price of medicines in general have undergone a jump.

When you say this, the answer you are given is that China and India produce all these things as if they were alone, because European companies have relocated their production there. And then the discussion ends with "it's the market, darling".

But there are several things that don't add up to this thesis.

The first is that there are more market-oriented countries, such as the USA or the UK, which have held a greater production capacity IN SITU. And this is important, since a lot depended on POTUS 'ability to prohibit the relocation of "strategic" activities to China. In practice, not only does the president prohibit the import of strategic assets, but he can also avail himself of the right to prevent a company from relocating its plants.

This is interesting, because it poses a problem:

If it is possible for Draghi to block the export of Astrazeneca vaccines to Australia, is it also possible for him to prevent the multinational from relocating production to Australia?

And if the new European regulations that allow states to block hostile acquisitions are such when a foreign company tries to buy a local company, they are also such to prevent the entrepreneur, to take the money, from relocating production to China ( for the modest sum of XYZ) instead of selling the company?

This is the point: Europe is paying a very high price for past relocation. It is paying a very high price in human lives.

The logic of the relocation was that production went elsewhere, while the “know how” had to remain here. And in a sense this has happened: CureVac, AstraZeneca, BioNtech, are all companies based in Europe. If you think about it, a huge success in terms of skills. But the problem arises later, when relocation takes its toll: China and India close the borders, they no longer export (if not small operations of a few million doses, more propaganda than anything else), and at that point we have the vaccine , we have the know-how, but we don't have the production capacity.

Yet such a capacity existed in Europe.

The problem is that at a certain point in Europe, and ONLY in Europe (the USA, as you can see, does not suffer from the problem) it was decided to delocalize the PRODUCTION of medicines, leaving only development here. And the justification was that “yes, but we keep the know-how”.

And this, mind you, did not happen ONLY in the pharmaceutical field. Perhaps we do not realize that we are looking for a “green turning point” having in Europe a lot of know-how, and very little production capacity. Essentially the only production capacity that remains is that of wind turbines, and this happens only because transporting a wind turbine between continents is a non-trivial logistical issue.

And let's be clear: I'm not just talking about wind turbines and solar panels: for example, Italy has a record of Know How which is called Geothermal.

Although the countries that make a more visible use of it are those below, geothermal energy (or the use of geothermal energy for energy purposes) originates in Italy, near Piombino. The know-how, therefore, would be there. But the situation is this:

And when the Philippines beat you into a technology you literally INVENTED, something is going wrong.

Italy, being a country that is on faults and has an Apennine that rests on a second fault, has a gigantic geothermal potential. Perhaps only the locals know this, but such plants already exist, as in Ferrara ( https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrale_geotermica_di_Ferrara ) where it is used for heating purposes (today usually done using methane gas) which constitutes more than 40% of emissions.

But … if we wanted to extend the thing (and there is space for geothermal energy in Italy), we would immediately run into a problem: the lack of construction capacity.

If the horizon of the conversion from fossil to renewable is 2030, Italy (and Europe as a whole) would not have the industrial capacity to build enough geothermal power plants. We should ask US companies. I understand other countries that are geologically stable, such as Germany or Poland or Eastern Europe (France for example has large areas where it is easy (requires shallower drilling), but in general in any location whose name ends with "Terme" would be suitable.

There are over 30,000 companies linked to wellness in Italy and the regions with the highest number of spas are Campania (114) and Veneto (110), followed by Emilia-Romagna (24), Tuscany (22), from Lazio (18) and from Lombardy (16).
According to the data of the Federterme Report 2011 (Italian association of the thermal and mineral water industries), the Italian companies classified as thermal companies are 378.

You are practically sitting on the most gigantic source of clean, renewable energy in the world, and you are using it to firm your ass. (not that building the power plants should close the spas, mind you.)

Why is this happening? Always for the same reason: slowly the Italian industry, and to some extent European, has relocated where labor was cheaper.

We are fragile in facing the crucial challenges that await us, for the simple reason that we have moved our industrial capacity abroad, comforting ourselves with the false idea that "what matters is know-how"

The covid, with the absurd situation for which Europe has invented some of the most used vaccines (Pfizer, AstraZeneca), explains one thing well. Explain that having the know-how while you have no productive capacity, in a world that will be more and more divided, is useless. (I also mention Curevac because it was the first company to start the trial, Trump tried to buy it and secure the monopoly, there was a whole series of spare parts at the top when they were stopped, and now it is behind: the EMA is examining the data. But in terms of inventions, they were the first, and as I am).

And if you want a culprit, and you want him when the shit hits the fan the second time , you don't have to look for him in Brussels: all you have to do is ask Confindustria.

Because the delays in the vaccination campaign, due to the lack of production capacity, are counted in hundreds of thousands of deaths.

And sooner or later someone will have to do justice.