Ursula von der Leyen’s threat to invoke emergency powers blocking EU vaccine exports and requisitioning factories was fairly extreme. Her justification was that 41 million doses have been exported from the EU to 33 countries in the last six weeks alone at a time when its own vaccination programmes are struggling.
But, as I say in the Times today, this ignores two crucial points. First, it is not the EU making these vaccines but rather private companies. Second, the supply chains for vaccines are global and complex. ‘They can’t really be autarkic on this,’ says one cabinet minister. For example, the lipids used in the Pfizer vaccine tend to come from the UK. When I asked one minister if we’d bar the export of these if the EU blocked Pfizer shipments, I was told: ‘We are not threatening that’.
There is a real danger, given the nature of vaccine supply chains, that this situation could spiral out of control and we could end up in a world where everyone loses.
The lesson the British government is taking from this situation is the importance of domestic production. If in a crisis you can’t be certain that even fellow free-market democracies will honour contracts (as we saw this time last year when France and Germany banned exports of medical equipment) then you have to make sure that essential medical supplies are manufactured here.
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