Photographer: Alex Kraus / Bloomberg
Photographer: Alex Kraus / Bloomberg
Angela Merkel is starting to burst under the pressure of Germany’s faltering coronavirus vaccine program.
With the Chancellor publicly under fire for a lack of Covid-19 shots and her strategy to take responsibility to the The European Union looked out of place and snarled when it asked for answers by German state prime ministers at a meeting behind closed doors in early January.
She became more angry than those involved had ever seen and threatened to retaliate and expose the officials’ mistakes, silencing the participants. On other occasions, she has been close to tears in public in recent weeks.
Angela Merkel arrives January 21 for a press conference on Covid-19 in Berlin.
Photographer: Michael Kappeler / POOL / AFP / Getty Images
“It breaks my heart to see how many people have died in retirement homes in isolation,” she said in a speech recently.
Such an emotion is highly unusual for the down-to-earth physicist, who in her fifteen years at the helm of Europe’s largest economy has inevitably weathered one crisis after another. But as she prepares to hand over the chancellor after September’s election, the pandemic seems to be getting away from her. An opinion poll released last week confirms that. Only 11% of respondents thought the vaccine program in Germany is going well, while 61% saw major shortcomings in the rollout.
A reconstruction of the events for this story, based on information from government officials who asked not to be identified when discussing the private chancellery conversations, shows that the land’s vaccination bushes bear Merkel’s handprint. Her European focus sparked conflict within the German government, while she relied on an overload The European Commission hindered the rollout. A government spokesman declined to comment on the internal deliberations.
The tension has led to a high-stakes power game in Brussels. The EU is taking it up AstraZeneca Plc and other pharmaceutical companies, and imposing export controls in an all-or-nothing response to the perceived shortcomings.
The EU is lagging behind in the vaccine race
Cumulative doses administered per 100 subjects
Source: Data collected by Bloomberg
Germany’s efforts started well enough. Merkel’s government supported vaccine development at an early stage, making a leap forward over other countries.
In April, Health Minister Jens Spahn – Merkel’s old adversary – got in touch BioNTech SE and provided financial assistance. German will arrive in September to start received EUR 375 million ($ 450 million) in research funding, about three times that public listing at the end of 2019. In June Germany invested EUR 300 million in another German to start, CureVac NV, acquire a stake and fend off an approach by the Trump administration.
But a political battle was raging behind the scenes.
Spahn had long been a thorn in the side of the Chancellor. The ambitious 40-year-old conservative was an outspoken critic of her refugee policy and was only reluctantly offered a seat in her cabinet in 2018. The coronavirus crisis gave him the opportunity to increase his profile, and he planned to take it.
Angela Merkel and Jens Spahn at the Bundestag on January 13.
Photographer: John MacDougall / AFP / Getty Images
During the first weeks of the pandemic, Spahn held press conferences almost daily, until the chancellery ordered him to step out of the spotlight. In mid-March, Merkel placed the crisis under her wing, and Germany’s relatively mild lockdown held the spread. The impression was that Merkel had saved the day again.
Inundated with that success, she looked to Germany’s EU Presidency in the second half of 2020. There were major issues to be addressed, such as the painstaking Brexit negotiations and the groundbreaking recovery fund.
But Spahn remained active. In June he entered into a vaccine alliance with France, Italy and the Netherlands. The goal was to secure as many doses as possible and on June 13, the group signed a preliminary contract with AstraZeneca for 400 million shots. What could have been good news ringed alarm bells in Berlin and Brussels.
Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, asked the chancellery to stop Spahn’s alliance. Merkel’s former defense minister made it clear to the chancellor that Spahn’s efforts could overshadow Germany’s EU presidency.
As a committed multilateralist, she did not want to be reminded of saving Germans at the expense of the rest of the EU. Shortly after, Spahn apologized for the initiative.
“We think it makes sense for the committee to take the lead in this process,” Spahn and his three counterparts said in the letter – which was leaked to the media in January as part of a printing campaign on Merkel.
Visitors await doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine at a vaccination site in Wurzburg, Germany.
Photographer: Alex Kraus / Bloomberg
Meanwhile, the US was throwing money around as part of Operation Warp Speed. In May, the Trump administration promised as much as $ 1.2 billion in funding for AstraZeneca’s vaccine project. In July, the US agreed to pay $ 1.95 billion for 100 million doses of the BioNTech vaccine, with an option to acquire another 500 million.
Almost simultaneously with the US deal, the UK also agreed to buy 30 million doses from BioNTech and its partner Pfizer Inc.
Read more: Flubbed EU vaccine Unroll Risks Yet another existential crisis
Little happened in Brussels. In July, the Commission rejected a bid from BioNTech for 500 million doses amid doubts about the price and concerns about the super-cold storage of the shots.
Towards the end of the summer, the chancellery became increasingly alarmed at the slow progress, and Merkel asked von der Leyen to speed it up. At the end of August, the Commission concluded an agreement with AstraZeneca.
An EU agreement with BioNTech was only finalized on November 20, 11 days after the company announced that its vaccine candidate was more than 90% effective in clinical trials.
Even that was a struggle. Germany had to guarantee it would last until 100 million doses and 192 million euros added to the EU pot of money for virus deals. But as more studies showed the benefits of the shot, other member states lined up and the German popular allocations more than halved.
Meanwhile, a bilateral agreement that Spahn signed with BioNTech on Sept. 8 for 30 million doses exclusively for Germany was mired in red tape.
Leading the group
German conservatives are ahead of the polls, but the gap is narrowing
Source: Infratest dimap
“The process in Europe was certainly not as quick and straightforward as in other countries,” said BioNTech Chief Executive Officer Ugur Sahin. Spiegel, who blames the cumbersome bureaucracy and careless approach of the EU. “Apparently there was an attitude of: we are getting tired of it, it won’t be that bad, we have everything under control.”
While the EU procurement process sputtered, Merkel was busy establishing herself as the advocate for fairness in vaccines. In June she announced that Germany would donate EUR 600 million to the Gavi alliance, plus EUR 100 million for developing countries.
The global approach makes sense from a scientific standpoint, and there is certainly still a long way to go through which Germany – still better off than many other countries – can recover.
An EU agreement with BioNTech was not concluded until November 20.
Photographer: Alex Kraus / Bloomberg
But politically it made her allies squirm, especially as they looked ahead to the September elections. Bavarian state leader Markus Soeder – a leading Chancellor to succeed her as Chancellor – has supported Merkel’s European course, but noted: “It is also not wrong to care about your own country.”
To ease tensions, Merkel will hold a German vaccination summit on Monday, but the pressure remains tangible. When asked recently if she was willing to apologize for the missteps, she deviated and instead responded with a lecture on the complex manufacturing process, including the role of a saline solution.
“Of course we could have ordered more earlier,” Spahn said Friday, refusing to point publicly at Merkel or anyone else. “It is the virus that is our opponent, not the pharmaceutical industry and not each other.”
– With the help of Raymond Colitt and Hayley Warren