Eu

On a sweltering day in July 2018, German police pulled over a scarlet Ford S-Max hire car that was travelling at speed towards Austria. The driver, Assadollah Assadi, the third secretary to the Iranian embassy in Vienna, was arrested at gunpoint and taken into custody. Although unusual, there was a good reason for detaining the diplomat: Assadi had used his immunity to smuggle a bomb on a commercial airliner from Tehran to Austria, intending to carry out what would have been one of Europe’s worst atrocities in recent years.

Europe’s vaccine rollout has been a chastening experience for many in Brussels with the World Health Organisation describing it last week as ‘unacceptably slow’. So Mr S was intrigued to read an interview in Der Spiegel today with Thierry Breton, the EU’s Commissioner for Internal Market, in which the top official appeared to take credit for Britain’s vaccination scheme. Both at home and overseas, the UK procurement and rollout of the vaccines been widely seen as a success, with credit mostly going to the taskforce led by Kate Bingham. Not so, according to a bullish Breton, who claimed credit for all the vaccines produced in factories which happened to be based in EU countries.

It didn’t order enough vaccines, spent too little money, dithered over authorisation and then lashed out at the companies making them. Over the last few weeks, the catastrophe of the European Union’s vaccine roll-out has become painfully clear to everyone. We are already starting to see the toll it is taking on the continent’s health, with a brutal third wave sweeping across mainland Europe as new variants hit an unvaccinated population, and with fresh lockdowns, overflowing hospitals, and death tolls still climbing as they fall dramatically elsewhere. And yet there is also a second stage to that crisis – an economic catastrophe – that is just getting started.

Debts would be shared. The strong would offer a helping hand to the weak. Money would be raised at incredibly cheap rates to help countries recover from the impact of Covid-19, while at the same time building back a greener, tech-based economy. Last summer, as the epidemic engulfed the continent, the European Union took a massive step forwards towards a fiscal union, launching the ‘Coronavirus Recovery and Resilience Facility’ with £600 billion of common debt. The more swivel-eyed europhiles hailed it as a ‘Hamilton Moment’, a reference to the first Treasury Secretary of the United States who bound that fledging union together through the bond market. It would be a tangible example of how ‘solidarity’ helped everyone.

Remember when the EU was going to provide an antidote to the spectre of vaccine nationalism? While Italian authorities are raiding pharmaceutical plants for vaccines, the European Commission is pushing for measures to block vaccine exports to countries that do not 'reciprocate'. Unfortunately, European authorities have it exactly backward. Instead of seeking to expand the existing supply, their ham-fisted policies risk having the opposite effect. The ongoing war on AstraZeneca is bound to make every pharmaceutical firm think twice before signing a contract with the EU. And with vaccine production chains spanning across numerous jurisdictions, including non-members of the EU, export restrictions increase legal uncertainty and can disrupt supplies further.

Ursula von der Leyen’s threat to invoke emergency powers blocking EU vaccine exports and requisitioning factories was fairly extreme. Her justification was that 41 million doses have been exported from the EU to 33 countries in the last six weeks alone at a time when its own vaccination programmes are struggling. But, as I say in the Times today, this ignores two crucial points. First, it is not the EU making these vaccines but rather private companies. Second, the supply chains for vaccines are global and complex. 'They can’t really be autarkic on this,' says one cabinet minister. For example, the lipids used in the Pfizer vaccine tend to come from the UK.