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TThe EU has done an all-powerful feat of procuring treatments for Covid-19. As a result, vaccination centers are running out of supplies. National governments want coups rather than excuses for what went wrong. The search for scapegoats has begun.
Stripped of the legal squabbles between Brussels and AstraZeneca, the protectionist plan to ban drug exports, and the now-abandoned plan to close the Northern Ireland-Republic border, the EU has been incompetent, and no amount of thuggish tactics can. do what. get away from that fact.
About 12% of people in the UK have been vaccinated compared to 2% in the EU, a big difference. The German newspaper Die Zeit summed up anger at the botch that will cost lives and livelihoods with a simple statement: “The best Brexit announcement.”
That’s a big turnaround from the ‘plague island’ taunts aimed at the UK a few weeks ago, but it’s understandable given the way the European Commission has engineered the kind of centrally planned failure reminiscent of the Soviet Union in its sunset years, even down. to apparatchiks desperately looking for a factory manager they can blame for a fiasco of their own making.
However, anyone in the UK who is tempted to gloat over the EU’s stuttering vaccine program should think again. The death of a German or Italian retiree from Covid-19 is as sad as the death of a British retiree. What’s more, the consequence of having so few people vaccinated is that the fear factor will remain high in the EU, making it difficult for governments to loosen physical distancing rules and making people much more cautious. The economic recovery will be delayed and that does not benefit anyone. The sooner the EU closes the vaccination gap with the UK, the better.
However, it must be said that this was not exactly what was expected. The UK government took a lot of action last summer when it announced that it would not participate in the EU plan to collectively procure vaccines. Britain, it was said, would have to wait for their blows while the rest of Europe received quicker protection. The subtext was that the government was allowing the Brexit ideology to interfere with public health. The headline for this document read: “UK Plan to Avoid EU Vaccine Scheme” Unforgivable “Critics Say”.
To be fair, that was perhaps a reasonable expectation, given the government’s disappointing track record in providing PPE and delivering an effective test, trace, and isolation system. It was also assumed that Brussels could strike better deals with pharmaceutical companies because it was buying in bulk.
But what really mattered was not the price, but the speed and breadth of supply. Britain’s approach was to sign contracts early with many drug companies in the hope that some of them would prove effective. Had they been left to their own devices, that would have been the preferred option for other European countries, including Germany, France and Italy, which could have signed contracts on the same terms as those signed by the UK.
Instead, Brussels leaned on EU member states to support a collective effort, which delayed placing orders for the AstraZeneca vaccine by three months. Pascal Soriot, CEO of AstraZeneca, says the UK’s three-month lead was important because it enabled technical problems in the production process to be solved.
It wasn’t until the fall that the EU placed orders for the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine (even though the breakthrough was made in a German lab) and even later before ordering some of the Moderna vaccine. Last Friday, the pharmaceutical company Novavax said it had developed a vaccine that was effective against Covid-19. The UK has reserved 60 million doses; the EU none.
The approach taken by the commission was designed to show Europe’s solidarity in the face of the crisis, but it has had the opposite effect. Individual countries, trying to explain to their angry populations why vaccine centers have run out of drugs, now wish they had gone their own way. Some, like Hungary, have in fact done so, and the Budapest government has placed an order for the Russian Sputnik vaccine.
As with all major mistakes, there are lessons to be learned. One is the importance of having sufficient national capacity to meet the demand for vaccines. Britain is fortunate that the pharmaceutical industry is a manufacturing sector in which it maintains a world-class presence. The speed at which AstraZeneca produced the vaccine demonstrates the merits of collaboration between academia and business, and the merits of having an industrial strategy. Nurturing fledgling biotech companies makes even more sense now than it did a year ago.
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A second is that acquisitions are important. Strictly speaking, nothing prevented Germany or France from adopting the UK approach, but they felt compelled to support the centralized approach taken by Brussels. Having the freedom to do things differently paid off.
Regulation also matters. Britain launched its vaccine program more quickly because it approved the drugs earlier. EU regulation does not necessarily mean better regulation. Sometimes there are advantages to doing things your way and this is one of them.
Despite what Die Zeit says, it is unlikely that any other EU country will opt for its own version of Brexit. That said, people in Germany would like to ask a couple of simple questions: Would we prefer health policy to be run by our own government or by the people of Brussels? And would we prefer that life and death decisions were made by people we can vote for out of power or by an unelected body where no one has to take responsibility for even the most colossal and humiliating failures?
