Weekend Read: How the EU lost the vaccines war

In the end, they drew back from the brink, just. EU leaders, notably Germany’s Angela Merkel, refused to back a proposal by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen this week to suspend exports of Covid vaccines from the bloc by companies deemed not to have honoured their contracts on deliveries to member states. 

Where this leaves the EU, and in particular Von der Leyen, is not yet clear. Chancellor Merkel’s refusal to back her fellow German on a matter of this importance can hardly be seen as a vote of confidence. 

Equally in play is the future influence in Europe of President Emmanuel Macron of France, who threw his weight behind the Commission strategy only to be slapped down by a combination of Merkel, Mark Rutte of the Netherlands and Alexander de Croo of Belgium. 

Once again, the Franco-German motor of the EU is sputtering. 

For Pfizer and AstraZeneca – the latter a touchstone in the row between Britain and its “friends and parters” in the EU – the decision to leave it up to member states to impose or not impose restrictions on vaccine exports will have come as a relief. An EU-wide ban on exports of vaccines made in Europe beyond the EU’s borders would have ramped up the existing trade war with Britain and put at risk the complex supply chains that sustain vaccine production across the world.

To date, the coronavirus has killed 126,000 people in the UK and some half a million in the EU. But while the death toll in Britain, together with the rate of infections, is falling, the situation in Europe is steadily getting worse. As a result, the difference factor – vaccines – is being fought over in a manner that mocks any remaining pretence of European unity. 

It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that a vaccines curtain is descending along the crease line of The Sleeve that is the English Channel. The UK government believes that, by acting quickly and decisively on vaccines, it has got on top of the virus. The EU, which moved only slowly and hesitantly, is convinced that the British, in their familiar guise of Perfidious Albion, have cornered much of the available supply and, even in the face of a resurgence of the virus across Europe, refuse to relent on the principle of first come, first served. 

At the latest EU Zoom summit on Thursday, it was agreed that most of the member states disagreed with the Commission on how to ramp up the production and distribution of vaccines. Von der Leyen had sought to play the hard cop, arguing that the only way to secure adequate supplies was by way of a Europe First strategy. France, Italy and Spain agreed. They are in the middle of a third wave of Covid and desperately need more vaccines. But when Angela Merkel came out as the soft cop, supported by, among others, the Dutch, Belgians, Swedes and Irish, the Commission President was forced to back down. Her export ban survived in theory, but only so long as it is not used in practice. 

The former German defence minister, installed as head of the Commission 15 months ago in what now looks to have been a fit of absence of mind by the European Council, did her best to sound pugnacious and in control of events.

“We have to, and wish to, explain to our European citizens that they will get their fair share (of vaccines)… companies have to honour their contract to the EU before they export to other regions in the world. This is, of course, the case with AstraZeneca. I think it is clear that, first of all, the company has to catch up, has to honour the contract it has with the European member states, before it can engage again in exporting vaccines.” 

But by now, nobody was listening. 

The danger is that while Britain may have won this particular battle, the war will continue. There were diplomatic efforts made last week, with Boris Johnson calling those EU leaders critical of the Commissions proposed export ban. Officials were dispatched from London to pursue peace. This weekend or early next week a deal of some sort on short-term cooperation looks likely to be announced.

But even though the Covid crisis will end, if not this year, then next, when it does the von der Leyen-led Commission will be vengeful. Macron, too, will be in no mood for compromise. With the presidential election campaign in France due to open in less than 12 months’ time, he has to show voters that he is on top of the Covid crisis, or at any rate is not about to put his country on a ventilator pending a vaccines miracle. 

Support for a tough line against Britain will also come from Rome and Madrid. In Germany, meanwhile, where the pandemic is surging, not everyone agrees with the softer Merkel line on Britain. Federal elections are scheduled to take place in September, and with Merkel set to retire and the permutations of a future coalition up in the air, who knows on which side Berlin will come down next time round? 

In Brussels, and in many – though not all – of the chancelleries of Europe, a grievance is being nurtured. Britain was reckoned to have come a poor second out of the Brexit trade talks. Its fisheries sector was in crisis; trucks that had delivered goods to the UK market were returning empty; and the City of London was losing ground to Amsterdam, although the sums involved were small. 

But then, with Covid refusing to go away, Britain did better. The NHS, hard-pressed and exhausted, rallied to distribute vaccines. The nation stopped complaining and began to pull together. 

It turned out that the Johnson government, previously something of a bad joke on the Covid front, had secured access to more vaccines than you could shake a stick at and was ready to administer these in an efficient, coordinated manner to millions of its citizens. It is an effort on a massive scale that, notwithstanding the difficulties and hardships still ahead, looks to have left Britain in control of the battlefield. 

In Downing Street, Boris Johnson is basking in new-found popularity. His behaviour in the early days of the pandemic was reckless. He poo-pooed the wearing of masks; he skipped five meetings of Cobra, the government’s emergency response committee devoted to the crisis; he shook hands with all and sundry, including patients in a hospital he thought were infected with the virus; and he refused to impose a national lockdown until 23 March, two weeks after most of Europe. 

But then, on 20 May, as if released from a spell, related no doubt to the fact that he himself had almost died from Covid, he swung into action, setting up a team whose central mission was to “stop people from dying”. 

The Vaccine Task Force (VTF), under Kate Bingham, a distinguished biochemist and businesswoman, also married to Jesse Norman, the financial secretary to the Treasury, went about its work with an inspired sense of purpose. By the late autumn, six months into the health crisis, with the death toll in Britain one of the highest in the world, the UK began to turn the corner. Forty million doses of the trail-blazing Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine were ordered, enough to vaccinate up to a third of the population. Almost simultaneously, an order for 100 million doses of the new AstraZeneca vaccine, developed in cooperation with scientists at the University of Oxford, was placed, marked for early delivery and sufficient, under the two-jabs formula, for 50 million people – virtually the entire adult population of the UK.  

According to an official study by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Development, the VTF’s focus was on vaccines, preferably manufactured at scale in the UK, that could be ready for use in the course of 2020. But that turned out to be a tad optimistic. Rapid regulatory approval was crucial, which put pressure on both the companies engaged in research and development and the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), which had to give the green light. You could press on the accelerator, but you couldn’t cut corners. 

At any rate, priority was given to those vaccines with the earliest possible delivery dates, meaning that Pfizer was the first name on the order book, followed by Moderna and AztraZeneca. The two American giants have plants worldwide, while Astrazeneca, a giant in its own right, has facilities across Europe. The strategy, in the view of the Department of Business, not only secured early-dose volumes of ready-to-go vaccines, but offered time to NHS teams to prepare for deployment. 

It was now time to pick up the pace. In September, the government secured 60 million doses of the latest entry into a crowded market, the French-engineered Valneva vaccine, at a cost, according to Valneva, of £405 million, with options for a further 130 million doses for delivery between 2022 and 2025. Next up were the single-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine, of which the UK has been promised an initial 30 million doses (with options on 22 million more), and Novavax, 60 million doses of whose as-yet unapproved vaccine are currently on order.

Novavax, based in Maryland, is joining forces with the biotechnology division of the Japanese Fuji Corporation to operate a manufacturing plant in Stockton-on-Tees to supply the global market. But for now, Novavax shots delivered in the UK will be for the US.

One clear advantage of the Valneva deal is that the company has a large, manufacturing facility, located, with government backing, in Livingston, Scotland – one of three state-of-the art plants established in the course of the last three months designed to future-proof the UK against any threats from Europe to cut off supplies of vaccines made in the EU. The others are at Harwell, in Oxfordshire and CGTC, in Braintree, Essex. The aim is to make the UK not only self-sufficient, but a world leader in the field.

Ursula von der Leyen may wish she could turn off the tap supplying vaccines to Britain. The truth is that, from this year onwards, she will lack the ability to do so. 

The result of all this feverish activity is that the British people are being vaccinated at an impressive scale, behind only Israel and, at the last count, Malta. As of this weekend, 31,766,669 Britons have received at least one dose of vaccine, and while the overall number of deaths related to Covid remains frighteningly high, at more than 126,000, the mortality rate is in sharp decline. Figures show that just 98 Covid patients died in the UK in the 24 hours ending midday on Thursday, against 460 in Italy, 272 in France  and 229 in Germany. 

No one, denies the dynamic nature of the British comeback. Last summer, the UK was on its knees, locked down and demoralised.  Germany, under the leadership of Angela Merkel, was recording only a small number of deaths from Covid and seemed to have the crisis well under control. France, though far behind its continental neighbour, was comfortably ahead of Britain. Even Italy, which had suffered terribly in the first weeks of the pandemic, looked to be slowly recovering its equilibrium. 

But all the while, a crisis had been brewing in Brussels, with fallout that would reach into every one of the EU’s 27 member states. And from hubris, it was but a small step to nemesis. 

Last spring, as Covid began to engulf the whole of Europe, including the UK, Von der Leyen concluded that it was up to the Commission – her Commission – to step up and act on behalf of the Union. This was entirely rational. It made sense for one body to negotiate with Big Pharma rather than for all 27 member states to cluster round, each with their own, often contradictory, demands. Chaos could easily have ensured. 

The problem was two-fold. First, Brussels had left it late in the day to begin the purchase process. Britain was out of the blocks while the Commission was still pulling its shoes on. Believing that vaccine development was a long and tortuous process (which it usually is), it decided to rely in the first instance on lockdowns, masks, social distancing and PPE as the main means of keeping Covid at bay. This was not, in itself a bad idea. In Germany it worked with spectacular effect. But when it turned out that in America and Britain, the normal rules had been relaxed, so that a cluster of vaccines were awaiting approval by the turn of the year, Europe was left standing    

The second problem was that the Commission does not have a functioning health directorate. Contrary to the claims during the referendum campaign that Brussels has a finger in every pie, there was no EU health pie, just as there are no EU medical institutes and no EU NHS. There is a European Medicines Agency, charged with certifying pharmaceutical products, including vaccines, but other than that, nothing. The latest publication from the Directorate for Public Health and Food Safety, which went up on its website in February, was a consultation paper on genetically-modified maize. The one before that covered marketing practices in the food sector.  

Such pie as there was in the Berlaymont was little more than fancy pastry, containing little or no meat. 

When top-level fonctionnaires from Brussels – sleek, multi-lingual, many of them no doubt with a masters degree from the College of Europe – went out to clean up on vaccines, they found that British ferrets had got there first. They got contracts alright, with delivery dates attached, but were unable to insert clauses that bound the manufacturers, including AstraZeneca, to give the EU first dibs in any supply disputes with the UK. 

Britain’s belt and braces approach to vaccines, which has prompted it to order an estimated 470 million doses for a population of 66 million, explains the resentment felt in Europe, home to 450 million citizens. With the number of cases across the continent rising from an estimated two-hundred per million inhabitants in mid-February to 270 per million last week, the bloc is struggling to obtain the volume of vaccines it needs. 

The UK government is acutely aware of the charge that it is hoarding. Starting with the truism that it is the first duty of a sovereign government to protect its people, it goes on to make the case that it cannot be sure that all the vaccines it has on order will turn up or be approved and that it is planning not just for 2021 and 2022, but for the five-to-ten years after that. How useful old vaccines would prove against a different or significantly evolved Covid virus is open to question.

The answer given by the health secretary Matt Hancock to a journalist’s query on subject of over-ordering didn’t help. “I believe that free trading nations follow the law of contracts,” he told the Financial Times. “They (the EU) have a ‘best efforts’ contract and we have an exclusivity deal. Our contract trumps theirs. It’s called contract law. It’s very straightforward.” 

Hancock’s reference to “free-trading nations” was a clear dig at the EU, which Britain these days likes to label a protectionist club. But it was Hancock’s declaration that contract law trumps need that will most stick in the craw of rival health service chiefs. Would Hancock have advanced the same argument if it was the EU that had snaffled most of Europe’s supply of vaccines and was refusing to concede any to the UK?

Europe is sorely vexed that while millions of doses of Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccine made in the EU have been exported to the UK, little has been forthcoming in the opposite direction, although there are components made in Britain and shipped across the Channel.

At one point, the President of the European Council, Charles Michel, went so far as to claim that the Johnson government had imposed an export ban on vaccines made in Britain. He was wrong and had to apologise, but he was not wrong to point out that under the terms of the tightly-worded contracts Britain concluded with vaccine manufacturers, not so much as a single finished shot can be sent abroad until the UK’s needs have been met in full – which is unlikely to be anytime in the next 18 months. 

If this approach had been adopted by the EU it would have been condemned by the EU for its “vaccine dictatorship” – the phrase actually used by Hancock when the possibility of such a move was first mooted in Brussels. 

As it is, Britain stands charged of using contract law to justify the fact that no vaccines have been exported from the UK since the start of the pandemic. This week’s Zoom meeting of the European Council revealed not only the undercurrent of indignation felt by EU leaders in the face of Britain’s sauve-qui-peut strategy, but also, tellingly, their unwillingness, or inability, to respond in kind. 

Meanwhile, unless something is done, thousands of people in Europe will die unnecessarily this spring and summer because their governments have failed to get hold of the only thing that could have saved them.

One positive sign this week that could point the way to a more balanced regime across Europe came with the news that Britain was ready to offer its expertise to increase production of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine at a plant in the Netherlands run by the subcontractor, Halix. Mark Rutte, on behalf of the Dutch government, has even indicated the likelihood of a breakthrough this weekend. 

In advance of Thursday’s Zoom meeting , possibly anticipating its outcome, Emmanuel Macron expressed the regret he felt over Europe’s dilatory approach to vaccine acquisition.  

“We weren’t quick enough, strong enough,” he told the Greek television channel ERT. “We thought that vaccines would take time to take off. We probably aimed for the stars less than some others. I think that must be a lesson for ourselves. We were wrong to lack ambition.” 

Europe, he said, which had pooled its efforts on acquiring vaccines, assumed that it would take far longer to develop one and lacked the ‘craziness’ to push for it within a year. “We are perhaps too rational.”

He praised the US for its rapid move on vaccines. He did not mention Britain.