Matthew Lynn Matthew Lynn

The EU has botched its vaccination programme

Matthew Lynn has narrated this article for you to listen to.

It was the most excruciating moment of Ursula von der Leyen’s short tenure as President of the European Commission. On Friday morning she hastily put together a press conference to counter the growing media storm across Europe over the EU’s handling of vaccine procurement. She doubled down on ‘solidarity’, announcing that the Commission had managed to secure more doses of the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine, but also that the EU would stick absolutely to buying together. ‘We have all agreed, legally binding, that there will be no parallel negotiations, no parallel contracts,’ she insisted testily. ‘We’re all working together.’ At the same moment, however, her former colleagues in Berlin, where she was never popular, were busily undermining her. Germany, it turned out, had secured an extra 30 million doses directly from the manufacturer. Vaccine nationalism, it turned out, was bad for everyone except Germany.

It was not the first time national health ministers had broken ranks. In June the health ministers of Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands were forced by their respective Chancellors and Prime Ministers to write to von der Leyen, apologising for their efforts to buy Covid-19 vaccines on behalf of their health systems. It was, they conceded, ‘of utmost importance to have a common single and joint approach to the various pharmaceutical companies’.

At that moment, with the new coronavirus raging across Europe, and economies in lockdown, the EU was busily putting together a plan that would make sure that if and when a vaccine became available, the continent’s citizens would be the first to get the shot. ‘When it comes to fighting a global pandemic, there is no place for “me first”,’ argued von der Leyen when she announced the scheme, before pointing out that ‘harmful competition’ for scarce resources should be avoided.

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