The EU’s chagrin: a series of unfortunate procurements

Samuel Rhydderch

In writing this article on the topic of EU vaccine shortages, I am reminded by Monty Python’s Cheese Shop sketch, in which John Cleese enters a supposed cheese shop that has a chronic shortage of cheese. “It’s not much of a cheese shop is it?” says Cleese, “Finest in the district” retorts the cheese vendor.

This is the position the EU Commission currently finds itself in, EU countries are piling into the EU’s shop and asking for all sorts of different cheeses such as the world-famous Pfizer cheese, or the ‘British’ one, with the EU insisting that it hasn’t actually got any but it still regards itself as a very fine cheese shop, and that they should all wait. Meanwhile a slow rumbling is heard outside, as Britain passes by the shop window in an articulated lorry carrying all sorts of wonderful cheeses by Pfizer and AstraZeneca (a home-grown cheese by the way). Indeed, at the moment, the EU isn’t much of a vaccine shop at all.

This is because the EU Commission is much like a cheese soufflé, that is to say, mostly hot air. Indeed, what is the point of a Commission that is unable to discharge its primary executive function of decision-making for the 27 Member States that orbits the gravitational nightmare that is EU bureaucracy.

Let us start from the beginning, the EU’s vaccine programme kicked off on the 17th June 2020, the programme (according to the Commission) relied on securing swift, equitable access and securing vaccine production lines in the EU to ensure proper supplies for each of the twenty-seven member states and their combined 447 million citizens. “This is the EU at its best” notes EU Health Commissioner Stella Kyriakides, clearly unaware of the oxymoron ‘EU’ and ‘best’ in that sentence. It is a well-known fact that the EU Commission’s biggest enemy is the EU Commission.

It is now the 10th of July 2020, and as dawn breaks across the British Isles, Guardian and Independent journalists such as James Felton and Rob Merrick catch whiff of this new EU Vaccine procurement scheme and, for the umpteenth time, decide the time is right to wage war against the UK government decision to opt out of the EU coronavirus vaccine programme, and accuse the government of “killing its own citizens”. So far so normal, it’s another successful day at the office for the Guardian. Other available accusations included (but were not limited to) “Brexit is a suicide cult” and “Brexit over vaccines” – not to be confused with “Brexit before breathing”, which relates to an earlier EU procurement scheme we equally refused to join. The UK had told Brussels that although it was a very kind offer they would rather not participate in a scheme rooted in pathetic fallacy and ideological dogma.

This caused outrage in Britain, why on earth would you want the ability to control and purchase your own vaccine supply chains when there are perfectly decent EU bureaucrats willing to do it for you? Do you not trust a bureaucracy tasked with providing twenty-seven countries with 447 million doses of vaccine? It turns out that no, we didn’t trust them, and we are now third behind Israel and the UAE in terms of vaccine deployment.

So, what is the situation with the EU vaccine shortage? Well, it’s quite a sad and desperate one. The highest performing country, Denmark, has vaccinated 3.6 people out of 100, France 1.6 out of 100, and Germany 2.5. Spain has vaccine centres but no vaccines – it has run out, and as of yesterday, super freezers in the Spanish region of Catalunya lay bare, they too have run out of vaccine. Deputy head of Madrid’s regional government, Ignacio Aguado, said that, at this rate, Spain was on course to reach 70% immunity by 2023. Funnily enough, France hasn’t run out of vaccines because the government don’t like vaccinating and the French don’t like vaccines, thereby ensuring a constant and plentiful supply of vaccine doses slowly rotting at -70 in freezers.

Why has this happened to the EU, you rightly ask. Well, it is a juxtaposed failure on two fronts: too few vaccine orders, and too much red tape.

Firstly, it was slow to order the promising frontrunner Pfizer/Biontech, only finalising its order in September and having to repurchase extra Pfizer doses in December after realising that 200 million doses isn’t actually enough for a population of 447 million. In contrast, by July, the UK had already signed deals with Pfizer, Valneva, and AstraZeneca worth 190 million vaccine doses. The second issue for the EU was the excessive bureaucratic red tape. The Commission first spent countless weeks playing a game of liability ping-pong with the Pharmaceutical companies, if François from Belgium suddenly grows and extra eye, who would pay him compensation? Big pharma said their liability ends after going through the clinical trials, the EU said no it doesn’t, it ends when we say so. Queue weeks of endless negotiations over François’s third eye.

The second lot of EU red tape directly relates to the speed at which the medicine regulators authorised the new vaccines for use across the EU. Desperately wanting to avoid a François ‘third-eye’ situation, the EMA took one month longer than the UK to look over the same data, the result of which meant that by end of December the EU had only just began to distribute mealy portions of vaccines to countries such as Italy – who had received a depressing first shipment of 9,750 doses for a population of sixty million.

Here in the UK, we dispensed with the requirement to submit a formal application with ribbons and red sealing wax. The U.K. Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency gave the Pfizer/Biontech vaccine a temporary approval on December 2, based solely on Phase 3 trial data it received on November 23. The MHRA looked at the data and cut out all the bureaucratic drapery. This doesn’t mean that the UK skimped on looking through the data, but it focused on the data that mattered. The result of this three-week head start meant that by the time the EMA had begun to assess the Pfizer vaccine the UK had already received its first 800 000 doses. And by the time the EU had begun vaccinating, the UK had already administered the Pfizer vaccine to half-a-million British citizens.

So, what is happening now, you rightly ask. The announcement of AstraZeneca not being able to fulfil contractual obligations is the straw that has broken the EU’s back, and they are now on a war-footing. AstraZeneca announced earlier this month that it would have to more than halve vaccine supply to the EU, owing to ‘production issues’ at one of its factories in Belgium. The EU put out a statement urging a resolution in a spirit of ‘true collaboration and responsibility’. And in that spirit of true collaboration and responsibility they raided one of AstraZeneca’s factory – but in the continued spirit, I imagine, of true collaboration. The EU think that Britain indirectly ‘stole’ vaccine doses from one of AstraZeneca’s EU factories, so they want to steal British doses in return. AstraZeneca claim that the UK has a priority clause in their contracts because Britain signed three months earlier, the EU say this is nonsense and that in return it’s going to block Pfizer vaccine exports bound for UK shores in retaliation.

At the moment the EU has turned nasty and is waging war and shooting at anything and anyone that moves. It has been backed into a corner as a result of poor vaccine procurement and increasing pressure from member states and has bared its teeth in response by threatening to wield some very un-European authoritative powers vested in Article 122 of the Lisbon Treaty, allowing the European Council to seize intellectual property and data, and perhaps even gain control of AstraZeneca’s production lines. Effectively a war-time occupation of a private company. A company, by the way, that is manufacturing this vaccine at cost as a service to the world.

And in a wild twist, the EU also announced that it would break a contractual obligation of its own: the very Northern Ireland protocol it fought so hard to put in place. It had activated (then quickly deactivated) Article 16 of the Protocol, which allows for either the UK or the EU to override parts of the Brexit deal with regards to checks on the Northern Irish border – effectively enforcing a hard-border. With both Ireland and Northern Ireland threatening to self-destruct and bring the world back to the 80s, the EU quickly backed down hours after activating the article. The EU is worried that the UK could use Northern Ireland as a sneaky backchannel as a way of circumventing a potential Pfizer export blockade, since all products exported from the EU to Northern Ireland have no checks. The EU could have placed export controls on goods from the EU to Northern Ireland, effectively breaking treaty obligations, though it has had to back down from activating this clause. But make no mistake, this was an act of raw desperation.

The EU has completely lost control of its vaccine programme. It is panicking, badly. And in its panic, it is, perhaps unconsciously, showing the world a side to the EU nobody has ever seen before: complete authoritative and sovereign enforcement of a bloc known more for collaborative gestures and community spirit than export blockades, treaty disownments, and Irish protocol activations.

It is the first time many have witnessed the EU’s raw hidden power, hidden because it is a dark power, one which is so clearly able to seize control of exports, raid factories, and break treaty obligations at will. This power has shaken Dublin, and it has shaken Downing Street, neither recognise this aggressive and powerful EU. The EU’s actions may not be malicious in intent, but they are out of order. And the UK would now have every right to bare its own teeth by blocking AstraZeneca vaccine exports to the EU in retaliation. This, in truth, is a very sad story. This is the result of an EU procurement scheme that has gone badly wrong, so unable to provide for its’ members. EU citizens are dying, and the Commission knows this. And in a desperate final attempt to provide for the EU family, it is doing everything in its power to stop vaccine exports and redirect them back into the EU. The EU is sending a message to the world, don’t mess with us when we’re desperate, because you will get hurt.

Photo by Daniel Schludi on Unsplash