Europe’s panic: the meltdown over vaccines
From magazine issue: 27 March 2021
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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.
The EU’s vaccine campaign has been made up of blunders that would be almost comic, were the medical emergency not so serious. An obscure Cypriot party hack, appointed Health Commissioner, was put in charge of the procurement programme, too little money was spent, the focus was on the wrong risks, authorisation was too slow and, to cap it all, many of the EU’s leaders then undermined public faith in the one vaccine — the Oxford — that was going to save them. Last weekend, France and Germany hardly vaccinated anyone. The response? Amid a shortage of supplies that is completely its own fault, the EU is resorting to export controls and bans. A shipment of 250,000 doses to Australia has already been stopped, and exports to the UK were next in line. On Wednesday, the UK and the EU pulled back from the brink of an all-out trade war, pledging to work together to increase the supply for everyone. But that came after Italian police had seized 29 million AstraZeneca doses they suspected might be bound for Britain. With that kind of tension still in the air, any truce is likely to be a fragile one.
On the surface, it is hard to understand why the EU is resorting to such extreme measures. According to the consultancy firm Airfinity, even if the EU does ban exports, it will gain only an extra week of supply, while the British will lose two months. The political and economic price will be high. The EU will trash its reputation as a place in which to do business. Why base a plant in somewhere such as Leiden if the authorities will seize control of production lines whenever it is convenient? If these contracts get overridden by bureaucratic fiat, then so can any other agreement. (After all, if the AstraZeneca deal with the EU was legally binding, the company would have been hauled before a judge in Brussels by now.) The EU risks turning itself into a pirate state, for very little gain, which helps explain why smaller countries that depend on multinational investment, such as Ireland, have become nervous. Blind panic is the only explanation that makes sense.
The EU now faces three colliding crises. First, and most obviously, there is an unfolding public health disaster. A third wave of Covid-19, driven by mutations from Brazil, South Africa and Kent, is hitting an unvaccinated population. ICU units in northern Italy and Paris risk being overwhelmed again. Much of France has gone back into lockdown, and so has Italy, while Germany will close down shops over the Easter break in an attempt to control the spread of the virus. While the UK, the US and Israel are finally coming out of the crisis, the EU is going back into it, with nothing to show for the past year of hardship. As long as the virus circulates, there is no guarantee it can get out of the mess. Brazil has shown that without vaccines, countries can simply get hit by wave after wave.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/europes-panic-the-meltdown-over-vaccines
