Here’s something I wouldn’t have predicted this time last year — the United States has delivered more COVID-19 vaccine jabs than any other country and has the fifth best rate of vaccination in the world at over sixty doses administered per hundred people. Meanwhile Canada, land of cuddly, polite, socialist single-payer health care, for once is looking across its southern border with envy. Its measly twenty-five jabs per hundred (a rate that was as low as seven just a couple weeks ago) is one of the lowest rates in the developed world.

In one of various efforts to try to fix the problem, Justin Trudeau’s administration has even elbowed developing nations out of line to access to the COVAX global vaccine procurement program — a move that should bring shame to any Canadian with a moral compass.

Across the pond, Britain’s vaccine rollout was supposed to have been bludgeoned by supply chain holdups resulting from Brexit and its accompanying refusal to participate in the European Union’s multinational approach to vaccine procurement. Yet it has enjoyed the best vaccination rate out of all major economies. As of last week, the country has likely reached herd immunity (an estimated 73.4 percent of the population are immune, combining the effects of both vaccination and previous infection). But most EU member states, as well-regarded on the US left as Canada is for their own variations on the theme of public health care, are performing little better than America’s northern neighbor, provoking the European Commission to threaten a vaccine export ban to the UK before settling on more modest but still spiky export controls.