Time for the EU to admit that it got it wrong

It needed to be said. The European Commission was wrong to threaten to invoke Article 16 of the Northern Ireland Protocol in a bid to prevent vaccines located within the EU from being transported into the UK across the Irish border.

Not only was it wrong, it was reckless and stupid. Heads should roll. If the measure had gone ahead, it would have been Brussels – not previously best known for its unionist stance – that re-established a hard Irish border. How crazy was that?

No wonder the Dublin Government and the Stormont Executive protested. No wonder Michel Barnier, now the point man between Britain and the EU, was quick to distance himself from what looked to be happening.

It is a measure of how desperate the EU has become over its stalled Covid vaccination policy that it could even contemplate such an insane act.

Imagine, though, how vaccine procurement might have worked out for Europe if Brussels had not stepped in to take charge. All 27 member states of the EU would have been queuing up outside the door of AstraZeneca’s Cambridge headquarters. The bidding war would have been vicious, with no holds barred, and who would have bet against Paris and Berlin coming out tops? If the Commission, with all the necessary authority, got it wrong, how much worse would it have been under a free-for-all? It would have been like a bad day on the floor of the old London Stock Exchange.

But now let us pause and step back just a little. What was the problem that Article 16 was, at some arcane level, expected to resolve?

Europe, and its 450 million citizens, are in deep trouble. Pfizer has belatedly undertaken to supply up to 75 million extra doses of vaccine to the EU, and AZ has agreed to supply an additional nine million. That still leaves a yawning shortfall, and the new orders won’t come through until sometime in the summer.

As things stand, Europe doesn’t have nearly enough vaccine to implement its intended inoculation programme, and when it looks across the Channel it sees the British Government collaring hundreds of millions more doses of a variety of vaccines than its 66 million people could ever reasonably need. Just to rub salt in the wound, Britain even announced today that it had placed yet another order for 40 million jabs from the French Valneva company, taking its total, delivered or en route, to 407 million – enough for every man, woman and child in the UK to receive two jabs three times over, with ten million to spare.

Depending on the measure used, Covid has killed more people per capita in Britain than in any other country in Europe barring Belgium and Slovenia. Perhaps for this reason, the Johnson government is clinging to its one-country-one-solution vaccination policy for dear life. It is the only thing it has got right in a crisis that has otherwise been marked by chaos and confusion and it is determined not to relax its stranglehold on vaccines for anybody for any reason anytime soon.

Brexit plays a big part in all this, as does chance. The UK left the European Union just months before Covid hit and has since taken to regarding its performance against the virus as a test of Brexit’s legitimacy. “They” are big and awkward; “we” are sure-footed and nimble. Overall, in dealing with Covid, the government has floundered. Other governments across Europe have made mistakes. France, in particular, was late to the party and has dithered, Johnson-like, ever since. But, as the death toll reveals, Britain’s record is dismal. If the prime minister had been the CEO of a large corporation, he would have been out on his ear months ago. The board and the shareholders would have demanded it.

Fortunately, a white knight was waiting to ride to the rescue: British science. Cue trumpets. The UK’s pharmaceutical sector is large and thriving. It is something we can be proud of. Yet, until Valneva entered the fray, only AstraZeneca, working closely with Oxford University, came up with a working vaccine, and the product it developed, rated at 70 per cent effective, is perhaps the least innovative in its field.

Glaxosmithkine, meanwhile, as the other big UK standard-bearer, came up empty. No small measure of schadenfreude has been directed at the French champion, Sanofi, for failing to produce a wonder drug to combat Covid. But Sanofi was developing its hoped-for vaccine in conjunction with GSK. So, if Sanofi, whose top man is Paul Hudson, an alumnus of Manchester Metropolitan University,  didn’t make the cut, neither did its British partner.

I’m not saying for one moment that AstraZeneca (the Astra part of which, let us not forget, is Swedish) didn’t come up with something worthwhile. It did. Not only does its vaccine work 70 per cent of the time, it is relatively easy to manufacture and store. It is in fact one of the best on the market. So, hats off to them, including their French CEO, Pascal Soriot.

My point is that scientific collaboration is the way forward, and so is collaboration between governments.

America’s Pfizer Corporation, which a couple of years back tried to swallow up AstraZeneca, is a vast organisation, with factories and research facilities in a dozen countries. Its CEO is Greek, Albert Bourla. Moderna, one of the other big winners in the vaccine race, has another Frenchman in the top job, Stéphane Bancel. Its chief scientist is Turkish. Science and technology are all about working together.

If Sanofi-GSK had come up with a winning formula, which they could easily have done (all research takes wrong turnings; without mistakes, there would be no need for experiments), what is the betting that the UK would have hailed it as another British triumph? The French would certainly have waved the Tricolore. But the truth would have been that both – and everybody involved in vaccine R&D – deserved the credit.

All sides to the present altercation need to calm down and resolve their differences. They are making a drama out of a crisis that already contains more than enough drama for all of us.

The British Government has decided, wisely, not to crow about its achievement on the vaccines front. But then it doesn’t have to. The Tory media is crowing for them, and the resulting harsh call has been heard all too clearly in Berlin and Paris.

At the same time, the Commission really does have to admit that it got it wrong from start to finish, trying to do too much too quickly (having started late) and wasting valuable time as a result. It is noticeable that in her recent tweets on Covid, Mrs Von der Leyen has made no reference to the row with Britain or to how she and her colleagues foolishly jumped the gun. Her refusal to acknowledge her share of culpability is nothing short of shameful. A proper apology for threatening Article 16 would be especially welcome.

This still leaves open the question of how many vaccines the UK has ordered. There is little doubt that Britain has ended up with – or can expect to end up with – far more vaccine than anybody else. Boris Johnson never tires of reminding us that the 27 member states of the EU are our “European friends and partners”. It is one thing to talk of British science liberating the world, it is something else when Britain First looks like being the order of the day

Only when Europe as a whole has beaten Covid, indeed only when the world has beaten Covid, can we relax and get on with the rest of our lives. Because the cliché has it right” no one is safe until everyone is safe.