European Union botched vaccine rollout

The EU has botched its vaccination programme | The Spectator - Matthew Lynn:

January 7, 2021 - "In June, the health ministers of Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands were forced by their respective chancellors and prime ministers to write to the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, apologising for their efforts to buy Covid-19 vaccines on behalf of their health systems. It was, they conceded, ‘of utmost importance to have a common single and joint approach to the various pharmaceutical companies’.

"At that moment, with the new coronavirus raging across Europe, and economies in lockdown, the EU was busily putting together a plan that would make sure that if and when a vaccine became available, the continent’s citizens would be the first to get the shot.... Smaller countries, such as a typically eccentric UK, which opted out of the scheme, would be left to fend for themselves as best they could. It would be a powerful symbol of how the EU could protect its citizens from the gravest threat in a generation. Vaccine ‘nationalism’ would be crushed for the common good.

"Fast-forward seven months, however, and it is clear that it is not working out quite as planned. Europe is falling woefully behind in the race to vaccinate its citizens. Ugur Sahin, the founder of the German company BioNTech, which jointly created the first jab with Pfizer, has revealed that a slow, bumbling, arrogant EU failed to order enough supplies, while approvals have been sluggish, and the rollout across the continent has barely begun. In truth, the vaccination campaign is turning into the greatest EU catastrophe since the euro crisis of 2010-11. And while that only bankrupted three countries and condemned a generation of Greeks to poverty, this one will result in the deaths of tens of thousands of people....

"At the time of writing, tiny Israel has carried out 1.2 million vaccinations, or 13 per cent of its population, the US 4.6 million and Britain 1.3 million. But Germany has managed only 265,000, Italy 128,000 and France a mere 516.... According to Sahin, the EU ordered so few doses of the BioNTech shot in the summer that it is now at the back of the queue for scarce supplies. Meanwhile, the vaccine it has ordered in big quantities, the Oxford-AstraZeneca shot, has not even started the EU approval process, even though it has already been sanctioned in Britain and India. It might be the end of 2021 before Europe is vaccinated, and perhaps even 2022. Unsurprisingly, people are starting to get angry....

"The EU has long harboured ambitions to take control of health policy, at the moment still reserved in the main for member states. Covid-19 presented the perfect opportunity. A virus, kind of obviously, has no great respect for national borders. It crosses them with ease. The crisis was a perfect moment for the EU to bounce back from Brexit, and take charge of coping with the epidemic with a transnational strategy based on science and co-operation....

"The ... people in charge were not up to it. In Germany, von der Leyen was notorious for a spell as Germany’s defence minister that was characterised by a string of procurement scandals and disasters. The Bundeswehr concluded she was hopelessly out of her depth.... Nor did the EU’s health commissioner inspire much confidence. Stella Kyriakides was appointed in 2019 after a brief career in Cypriot politics; with no disrespect to the Mediterranean island ... [with] a population of less than a million, it is hardly the place to prepare for an administrative task on the scale of vaccinating Europe....

""The EU was late to the party, placing too few orders, and at the wrong moment. Its initial budget for buying vaccines was just over €2 billion.In comparison, the UK, with 66 million people instead of 448 million, is set to spend £12 billion purchasing, manufacturing and deploying vaccines....

"Germany’s Der Spiegel has made the explosive allegation that France insisted the EU couldn’t buy more of the BioNTech jab than the one its national champion, Sanofi, was working on. But the Sanofi vaccine stumbled, making that worthless. As Sahin has revealed, the EU assumed that it would have a whole range of vaccines to choose from and became complacent. 

"Finally, the European Medicines Agency has been painfully slow.... The EMA, the EU’s health regulator, approved the Pfizer vaccine before Christmas only under pressure from Berlin, and weeks after the UK. There is no sign of approval for the Oxford vaccine, even though it is the only one that has been ordered in bulk. The EMA says AstraZeneca hasn’t submitted its application yet; it doesn’t seem to occur to anyone to pick up the phone and ask."

Read more: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-eu-has-botched-its-vaccination-programme

Update: The AstraZeneca vaccine was authorized by the EMA and EU on Jan. 6, and deliveries are expected to begin the following week.