There are plenty of different ways in which Matt Hancock, the health secretary, can be criticised for his handling of the Covid-19 crisis. Track and trace didn’t work, lockdowns were sporadic and probably too late, and the messaging wobbled all over the place. But comparing the British vaccination drive to France and the rest of the EU? That was completely right.
When Hancock remarked on Sky News yesterday that the UK had vaccinated more people in just three days than France had managed in total, his critics on social media went into a predictable meltdown. It’s not a competition or a race lectured the finger-waggers. We have only done one dose. And if there is a problem with the roll-outs of the shot across Europe, it is the fault of AstraZeneca and Pfizer and the rest of the greedy drugs industry.
But hold on. In fact, vaccination is a race, and there is nothing wrong with some competition between nations. There are two reasons for that.
First, while it may not be a race between countries, it is definitely a race against time. Tens of thousands of lives are at stake, and the faster this gets done the better for everyone. If competition spurs some innovation, then so much the better.
Second, it is only by making comparisons between nations that you can tell whether you are doing well or badly, and whether your own health system could make improvements. For example, we have done well, but we could clearly learn some lessons from the hyper-efficient Israelis (pay more for starters: Israel is stumping up more per shot than anyone). Likewise, the French, the Dutch, and even the usually well-organised Germans, could learn some lessons from the UK (work at the weekends, perhaps?).
In truth, the stalled vaccination campaign should prompt some soul searching across Europe. Was it a great idea, for example, to put a woman with a short and limited career in Cypriot politics in charge of the most critical government programme since WWII? It might have broken protocol, but the EU could have turned to Mario Draghi, the brilliant former president of the European Central Bank, and the man who single-handedly saved the euro? Or a leading industrialist? And was cost such a big deal as it seemed to think?
If the figures were reversed, and the EU were doing much better than we were, there would rightly be an uproar. The UK, as well, will have plenty of lessons to learn when this pandemic is over. But one of them might be that it is better to keep control of our own healthcare – and comparisons with other European countries are completely fair.
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