While the countries of the European Union (EU) suffer the consequences of delays in the vaccination plan against Covid-19, analysts condemn the Brussels procurement process, seeing how, instead, immunization advances rapidly in the former member of the community bloc: The United Kingdom.
Due to a problematic procurement program, the vaccination rate in the EU is around a fifth that of the UK. The British Government has already immunized more than 10 million people, the third highest number behind Israel and the United Arab Emirates. It did so after gathering the largest pool of antidotes per capita last year.
Vaccines are most urgently needed in Portugal, with a collapsed health system, but the head of the vaccination plan warned on Wednesday, February 3, that the nation “cannot do much more” as the EU has not purchased enough injections.
In Spain, the authorities stopped all inoculation processes in the Madrid community for ten days on January 27, due to the lack of new doses. The following day, three regions of France, including the Paris area, were faced with such a shortfall that they had to suspend the acceptance of new people to the immunization program to ensure that those who had already received the first of the two necessary doses could finish the process.
“No urgency”
This came amid tension between the European Union Commission and pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, which developed its vaccine with the University of Oxford. The EU announced that it expected the arrival of around 80 million doses by March. But on January 22, the Anglo-Swedish firm informed the EU that, due to problems in a factory in Belgium, it could only deliver 31 million doses in that period.
For its part, the UK signed its deal three months before the EU, which gave AstraZeneca time to resolve logistical problems, the company noted. Brussels even asked the firm to divert supplies that it had committed to with the British government, but the pharmaceutical company replied that its contract with London prevented it.
The UK negotiated a “much stricter contract”, said Adrian Wooldridge, political editor of The Economist and co-author of ‘The Wake-Up Call’, a book on the Covid-19 pandemic.
On February 1, AstraZeneca agreed to supply another 9 million doses to the EU, which means a total of 40 million injections by the end of March, half of what the bloc initially expected.
The European Union has also had problems with Moderna’s vaccines. On January 29, the US biotech company informed the Italian government that it would deliver 20 percent fewer antidotes than planned for early February. Meanwhile, the French government assured that it would receive 25 percent less than expected for February.
The same goes for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. After Brussels placed its first order in November, the US pharmaceutical giant announced on January 15 significant delays in distributing doses to the EU, prompting six countries to write to the Commission, complaining of an “unacceptable” situation. .
Once again, the UK acted much faster, buying its doses of Pfizer-BioNTech in July, four months before Brussels. Pfizer offered the EU bloc 500 million doses the same month, but Brussels rejected the proposal, considering it too expensive, according to an internal EU document seen by Reuters.
“Orders were late and focused on price; It seems the EU thought vaccines were not a priority, ”said Nicolas Bouzou, director of the Paris-based consulting firm Asterès.
Last summer, in the EU “there was no urgency” because “the contrast with the health calamity in the United States made European officials forget that the pandemic was actually a state of emergency that required a decisive approach to vaccination,” he said. Bruno Macaes, political scientist at the Hudson Institute in Washington DC and former Secretary of State for European Affairs of Portugal, in an article written by the British magazine UnHerd.
Before the pandemic, the European Union left health policy to national governments. However, Brussels took over the procurement of vaccines in the summer of 2020, as part of what the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, called a “European Health Union” in her speech on the ” State of the Union ”in September.
Member States were free to choose not to participate in this supranational scheme, but none did. Brexit made it “easy” for the UK to go its own way with vaccines, Bouzou noted.
“The EU Commission is very good at negotiating things like trade agreements, but traditionally it has not had competence in matters such as vaccines and contract negotiations, which were left to the Member States (…) The Commission decided to increase its competition and he wasn’t up to the job, he didn’t have the right people or the right skills, “Wooldridge said.
Instead, the British government put a successful bioscience venture capitalist, Kate Bingham, at the helm of its vaccine procurement program.
“Her competence is buying vaccines and writing contracts, and that is not the competence of Ursula Von der Leyen or anyone in her charge,” Wooldridge said.
A hard border about to be imposed
Brussels was hailed for being an example in protecting the interests of its member states during the troubled London divorce. However, on January 29, the vaccine fiasco threatened to undermine that competition. In what many saw as a sign of desperation, the EU triggered an emergency provision in the Brexit deal to impose controls on the export of vaccines shipped to Northern Ireland.
This would have required a hard border between the British province and the Republic of Ireland, after years of Brexit disputes had passed to keep the border open through a solution that London, Dublin and Brussels could agree on. The 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which put an end to the problems, obliges both the UK and the Republic of Ireland to guarantee an open border.
The EU Commission changed address a few hours after its announcement, and withdrew to outrage from Belfast, London and Dublin.
Despite backtracking in Northern Ireland, the EU Commission imposed a regulation on the same day that blocks vaccine exports to about 100 countries, unless the exporters receive an exemption from their national government. This prompted a reprimand from WHO Deputy Director-General Mariangela Simao, who said the export ban constitutes a “worrying trend.”
“The best publicity for Brexit”
The errors of the community bloc with vaccines even provoked harsh criticism in Germany, the most pro-European country on the continent. The Commission’s handling of vaccine procurement has been “a fiasco,” German Vice Chancellor and Finance Minister Olaf Scholz told the rest of the cabinet on Thursday.
It is “the best Brexit announcement (…) UK hardliners will not forget Von der Leyen’s Brexit auto-goal by almost imposing a hard border on Northern Ireland, while British Europhiles” will wonder more and more whether the departure from Brussels was so bad or not after all, “wrote the weekly Die Zeit, a pillar of German Europhilia, in an editorial last weekend.
On the other hand, and as predicted by several experts, Brexit has imposed costly friction on trade, while the Boris Johnson agreement replaced the risk of a hard border between the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland with the reality of barriers between his province of Northern Ireland and the rest of the British territory, causing concern and anger among many trade unionists in the province. “The details of Brexit have not worked out well,” Wooldridge said.
However, the EU vaccine fiasco “could not have been better designed for Brexit supporters, demonstrating their idea that leaving the EU means leaving a sclerotic institution,” he added.
“It has a geopolitical effect (…) The EU looks like a loser, while the UK, the US, Israel and even Russia look like leaders,” concluded Bouzou.
* This article was adapted from its original in english
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source https://pledgetimes.com/how-the-covid-19-vaccination-in-the-eu-became-the-best-advertisement-for-brexit/
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