BRUSSELS – As the European Union surpassed the toll of 500,000 people lost to the virus, the EU Commission chief said Wednesday that the bloc's much-criticized vaccine rollout could be partly blamed on the EU being over-optimistic, over-confident and plainly “late." European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen defended the EU’s overall approach of trying to beat the pandemic with a unified vaccine plan for its 27 nations, even if she admitted mistakes in the strategy to quickly obtain sufficient vaccines for its 447 million citizens. “We are still not where we want to be.
We were late to authorize. We were too optimistic when it came to massive production and perhaps we were too confident that, what we ordered, would actually be