Europe’s Self-Defeating Vaccine Fight – WSJ

Europe, the US and the UK have orders or options for approximately the same number of doses per capita. But the US and UK moved faster towards winning contracts, making it easier for pharmaceutical companies to prepare. According to British analytics firm Airfinity, Washington and London also spent about seven times as much on development, production and purchasing per person. Some US states face distribution challenges like many European countries, but US and UK regulators approved vaccines faster than their EU counterparts.

The results are already clear. By our deadline Thursday, the UK had been administering doses to over 11% of residents, while the US was nearing 8%. Denmark was a European success story at 3.7%, while France and Sweden languished at around 2%.

This has caused little reflection in Brussels. EU mandarins this week admonished AstraZeneca after the company announced that problems with production at a European factory meant it would deliver tens of millions of doses less than expected this quarter. The European Commission raided the AstraZeneca production site in Belgium on Wednesday.

“Europe wanted to be supplied at more or less the same time as the UK at the time, even though the contract was signed three months later,” AstraZeneca chief Pascal Soriot told an Italian newspaper this week. “So we said, ‘OK, we’re going to do our best, we’re going to try, but we can’t commit contractually because we’re three months behind the UK'”

EU Health Commissioner Stella Kyriakides said the contract requires vaccines to be diverted from factories in the UK to Europe. The company must publish the agreement and allow the public to judge who is telling the truth. But this ugly episode is a great advertisement for Brexit.

Incidentally, London gave the green light for the AstraZeneca vaccine in December. German officials ruled Thursday that the vaccine should not be given to anyone over the age of 64, and an EU decision is not expected until Friday.

Brussels will soon empower national governments to prevent millions of doses of vaccine from being exported from Europe. Such restrictions will certainly backfire, as other countries retaliate against Europe and complex supply chains fall apart.

Brussels is proving its unique talent for self-foot-shooting by turning its vaccine incompetence crisis into deeper economic damage. The main challenge for the EU after the pandemic ebb will be to revive economic growth despite decades of mismanagement. But nothing says ‘closed to things’ like harassing companies that provide life-saving medical treatments.