Europe’s panic: the meltdown over vaccines

The Dutch city of Leiden has rarely played a dramatic role in European history. Quiet, rainy and tucked away close to the sea, it is in many ways the Durham of the Continent. It was besieged by the Spanish in the Eighty Years’ War, Rembrandt was born and worked there, Einstein taught intermittently at its university — and that is about it. Yet this week Leiden is at the centre of European politics, and in a way that almost no one could have expected.

In the city’s science park, the biotech company Halix has a crucial role in manufacturing the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine. The European Union threatened to seize control of the plant, demanding that all its output be diverted from Britain to the Continent. If this happens, despite a seeming truce on Wednesday evening, it will be the moment at which the global vaccine wars that have been simmering for the past few months turn, in the language of military strategists, from cold to hot.

And yet beyond the day-to-day drama of which country gets which vaccine first, there is a bigger, more significant story playing out. The EU is in a blind panic as its jabs catastrophe gets worse and worse. What started out as a pharmaceutical crisis is rapidly turning into a series of far bigger public health, economic and political disasters.

This week’s summit of the bloc’s leaders, which aimed to get Europe’s vaccination programme back on track, instead showed how badly it has gone wrong. Britain has vaccinated more than half its adult population, and the United States is close to 40 per cent. Both countries have been rewarded with rapidly falling numbers of infections, hospital admissions and deaths. But EU countries lag far behind. In France, Germany, Italy and Spain, less than 15 per cent of their adult populations have been jabbed.