I had a "chat" with some European friends of mine today about the EU, Britain, vaccines etc. I thought there might be some interest here in seeing how the conversation played out.
RegisterMe - "Dutchman (and anybody else who wants to chime in), can you help me understand what's going on with this, because the picture is really quite confused. I'm also well aware that I am viewing things through a UK lens, and that might not be 100% accurate for all sorts of reasons.
The impression I'm getting is:-
1. To varying degrees, national issues eg vaccine hesitancy, risk averse national regulators (who misunderstand or misapply the precautionary principle*), lockdowns with different success rates, health service ability to vaccinate at scale, unhelpful comments by politicians (eg Macron).
2. The EMA being, relatively, somewhat slow / orthodox in terms of regulatory approval.
3. Commission issues in negotiating contracts.
4. Genuine difficulty scaling up production at some European sites.
5. The apparent requirement for the Commission needing to be seen to be strong / stalwart / looking after the interests of its citizens and being successful at all of this etc.
The result being a lot of pre-emptive finger pointing, distraction, blame assignment and good old cover your arse. Perhaps conflated with a portion of Brexit related resentment?
I mean it's not like the UK has had a "good pandemic". Sure, we've done extremely well on genomic sequencing (to the benefit of everybody), and we've done relatively well on vaccinations so far, but the rest of it has pretty much been a **** up...
Ian Hislop, a high profile, extremely articulate, and very smart strident Remainer and ardent critic of any and every government, was on Question Time last week. It was remarkable to see him of all people call the EU's behaviour "disgraceful".
* (It would have been more appropriate to push on with the vaccination program with the Oxford AZ vaccine to address a known and material risk rather than to halt its use whilst an unknown but known to be almost immaterial risk was assessed, and the hesitant / anti-vaxers can just go back to school).
Brit1 - "I mean I'm a big fan of the EU but they clearly have done a **** up of a massive scale here and are trying all the options to both cover their arses and "fix" it, of which some of the "fixes" could end up with larger implications - banning vaccine exports to the UK will simply solidify anti-EU resentment in the UK within the public perception".
RegisterMe - "yeah, I'm a Remainer, and I am beginning to resent the **** out of UVDL - I'd like to sanity check how valid that feeling is on my part
Scotsman - "I'm not sure that the EMA could be classified as slow, certainly slower than the UK, but the UK were somewhat caviler with their attitude.
What I would say is that the UK has probably burned all avalible good will from the EU with their Brexit anticts, and this is probably fallout of that situation"
Dutchman - "The way its reported and comes across here is basically, EU made deals for vaccines, where they focused a lot on unit price. EU has some of the cheapest bulk deals compared to other rich polities/countries. The (lack of) contractual delivery requirements looks to be an oversight. In order to save face, and keep the semblance of a vaccination program going, the commission is scrambling to keep vaccines in the EU. To transliterate a Dutch proverb: panic football. The quick fixes they think up break more than they fix, and in the end just makes the commission look bad".
"To be clear the UK are not to blame, nor the USA who are sitting on 40 million doses of unapproved AstraZenica. Its the EU Commission/negotiators not considering they might be in competition with others for any supply produced".
German - "thats what you get when you send 3rd rate politicians etc to the EU
"abstellgleis"
von der leyen ever only was good a ******* up the departments she had
and put the blmae on others
that woman hasnt worked a proper job in all her life
born into the right family. study for 10+ years. her doctorate thesis is a plagiate....
clap
Norwegian - "Reasonable summary but there is one element missing here. AstraZeneca stated as part of their contract with the EU that they didn't have any competing interests, contracts or similar factors that might impact their ability to deliver according to schedule. That combined with the contract's "Best Efforts" clause and the clauses stating production-facilities in the UK can be used to cover shortfalls in their EU deliveries might account for the EU's faith in AZN's ability to deliver and lack of stricter terms"
Brit1 - "I thought the politcio article that was linked here the other day covered all this well (
RM the one linked by
ilmoro )
RegisterMe - "to be fair to the UK too I think we did well on the therapeutics front - iirc it was the NHS that discovered the beneficial impact of using dexamethasone, and possibly also the NHS that twigged to "turning" patients"?
Norwegian - "In other news, two more patients with the bloodclots / low-platelets / brain hemorrhages combination that's causing concerns died yesterday, only four of the seven suspected cases remain alive"