To be fair I'm pretty sure discussion about pricing never were the bottleneck, they happened in parallel to the safety/efficacy approval, so Europe saved 1.2B Euros doing this, at no other cost.
Well $5 vs $2 isn't really what happened. It was more in the UK:
>Under Bingham’s direction, the taskforce helped the Government to secure agreements to have access to six different vaccines across four different formats, amounting to 357 million doses – without being certain any of them would work. Spending £1 billion up front, it could not have been a bigger gamble.
What did the EU "not do"? The EU did pretty much exactly the same thing, securing access to 2.3B doses from 6 different providers and investing 2.7B$ for vaccine development (on top of the price tag of the vaccines themselves).
I don't think I understand what you are trying to say.
