{UAH} AND THIS IS WHY DOALD J TRUMP REMAINS WITH AHUGE VOTE IN UNITED STATES He speaks sense

EU's behavior on vaccinations has vindicated Brexit

by Dan Hannan, Contributor | 

 February 01, 2021 12:09 AM

 

Perhaps now, U.S. commentators will finally understand what Brexit was all about.

A row over vaccines has brought out all the European Union’s worst features: its bureaucratic inertia, its elevation of political integration over every other consideration, its touchiness, and its contempt for due process.

A lot of people in the Biden administration see Brexit as a kind of British Trumpism, as a populist rejection of the international order. But that view simply cannot be reconciled with what is going on now. The EU, to cover its own failure, is peremptorily demanding that British vaccines be handed over, while the United Kingdom continues to make the case for a rules-based global approach.

Here is the sequence of events. In March 2020, the U.K. reached the view that mass inoculation was the surest way out of the crisis. Ministers steered researchers at Oxford University toward a partnership with the British-Swedish pharmaceutical firm AstraZeneca and poured money into the development of a vaccine. The British government preordered supplies from other companies, too, but it made a calculated bet on the success of Oxford, purchasing some 400 million doses.

That bet paid off. The Oxford vaccine is one of three to have been approved by regulators, and it is much cheaper than the other two, as well as being easier to distribute, since it can be stored at normal refrigerator temperatures.

Some European nations had started to place similar orders, but the European Commission, the EU’s executive, stepped in and insisted that it negotiate en bloc for its 27 members. As a result, many weeks passed before the EU finally reached an agreement that, according to AstraZeneca, is the same in its essentials as the one that the individual European countries tried to sign earlier.

Since then, there have been delays in the production. That is hardly surprising given the vastness of the endeavor. There have also been problems in scaling up supply in Britain, the United States, and elsewhere. But because the EU signed its contract so much later, there was less time to iron those problems out for its order. As AstraZeneca’s CEO, Pascal Soriot, explained in an interview with an Italian newspaper: “The U.K. contract was signed three months before the European vaccine deal. So with the U.K., we have had an extra three months to fix all the glitches we experienced. As for Europe, we are three months behind in fixing those glitches.”

As criticism of the EU mounted, the European Commission began to lash out. Had its sole interest been in acquiring more doses, it might quietly have asked Britain to sell it some. Instead, determined to divert attention from its procurement failures and horrified at the idea that Brexit was being vindicated, it blamed AstraZeneca, raided its Belgian factory, and threatened to block the export of vaccines manufactured in the EU. It demanded — it did not request — that AstraZeneca surrender 75 million doses bought and paid for by the U.K. (doses, remember, that Brussels had still not approved). Otherwise, as the German Member of the European Parliament Peter Liese put it, “the only consequence can be immediately to stop the export of the biotech, and then we are in the middle of a trade war, so the company and the U.K. better think twice.”

“We reject the logic of first come, first served,” said Stella Kyriakides, the EU’s health commissioner, insisting that AstraZeneca had “a moral and societal obligation” to allow the EU to jump the line.

Maybe the European Commission thought that attacking Big Pharma was an effective deflection strategy. But AstraZeneca is the only pharmaceutical company that, from sheer high-mindedness, is offering the vaccine to all comers on a not-for-profit basis.

So, who is acting like an insecure dictatorship here? Who are the populists? London wants to keep supplies flowing and to ensure that poorer countries get their share. Brussels, in contrast, is blustering and threatening blockades. It even sent the police to AstraZeneca’s Belgian factory. And all because of its own mistakes, its inertia, its determination to make sure that each of its nations got something, its openness to lobbying by continental pharma companies and its utter horror at the idea that its separate nations might do better acting alone.

The pro-Brussels politicians and media in Britain, which, 10 months ago, were urging the U.K. to join the EU’s joint procurement scheme, have suddenly gone very quiet. The German broadsheet Die Zeit, which spent five years sneering at Brexit, admitted in a chastened headline that the row was “The Best Advert for Brexit” and complained that the EU had been “slow, bureaucratic and protectionist.” No doubt the New York Times will still find some way of blaming Britain for all this. But the rest of the world seems finally to be waking up.

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