Boris Johnson may have just hit his target of 15 million vaccines to the top four priority groups two days early but don’t get ahead of yourself and mistake that for success. Just as ministers begin to pat themselves on the back over a rare government success story in the UK’s vaccination programme, the Grauniad has published an article attempting to offer an explainer as to why things are not as they seem.
While EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen is under fire from all sides over the bloc’s sluggish vaccine rollout, Jean Quatremer — the Brussels correspondent of the French daily Libération — has penned a piece entitled ‘Brexit Britain’s victory over the EU on Covid vaccination is not what it seems’.
Quatremer writes that ‘the bloc’s joint vaccines strategy — far from being a fiasco — is delivering a better outcome than the UK’s’. The reasons for this? First, the UK has had to pay a higher price per dose.
Second, the UK’s ‘success’ is in reality an illusion:
But, and there’s a very big but, the UK’s “success” is a really an illusion: because to be fully effective, the vaccine requires two doses. And only 0.80% of the UK population has received both shots, less than that of France (0.92%), and a long way behind Denmark, which has 2.87% of its population fully vaccinated.
Finally, Quatremer also criticises the gap between the first and second dose despite the fact that the World Health Organisation recently backed the 12-week gap between doses of the Oxford vaccine.
Given that a recent survey of over 5,000 people by German newspaper Der Spiegel found 60 per cent of German citizens said their view of Brussels had worsened due to its bungled handling of the vaccine roll-out, Mr S suspects that champions of the European Union approach would find their time best spent convincing their fellow EU members before preaching to Brits…
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