Last Wednesday, the European Union went rogue. Its leaders stopped behaving like dull functionaries and started behaving like Chavista demagogues or Nasserite dictators.
Humiliated by the slow pace of their vaccination rollout and furious at being outperformed by Brexit Britain, Eurocrats tabled proposals to seize factories, commandeer lawfully purchased supplies, and tear up intellectual property rights. Such behavior would be shocking at any time, let alone amid a pandemic. Supporters of a law-based international system are left wondering whether to move the EU from the “Western” column into the “dodgy” column.
“It is hard to explain to our citizens why vaccines produced in the EU are going to other countries that are also producing vaccines,” said Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission.
Actually, it’s not hard at all. The reason is that Brussels was characteristically slow and bureaucratic in placing its orders. It insisted on taking over the negotiations from its 27 members, some of whom were already well advanced in ordering their supplies, haggled over the price, applied needless red tape, and, according to reports, strung things out in the hope that it would be able to get a French-made product.
The United Kingdom, in contrast, was quick out of the traps. It preordered from several suppliers, investing especially heavily in the AstraZeneca vaccine. As that company’s CEO, Pascal Soriot, explained: “The U.K. contract was signed three months before the European vaccine deal.”
Being outperformed by what some of them still regard as a renegade province was too much for Brussels officials. They declared that vaccines would not be sent to the U.K. Every other neighboring state — Iceland, Serbia, Belarus, Turkey — was exempted from the ban because they had not committed the cardinal sin of Brexit. EU officials then threatened to expropriate stock that the U.K. had purchased from the American firm Pfizer, which has a plant in Belgium.
Think about that for a moment. The EU was upset about delays in its order from AstraZeneca. It had a spectacularly weak case because delays were covered by a “best endeavors” clause. But whatever the rights and wrongs, the EU’s dispute was with AstraZeneca, not the U.K. Yet it was threatening to blockade the U.K., going so far as briefly to impose a hard border in Ireland, the border it had previously claimed would threaten the peace process, from no higher motive than pique at its relative success.
It gets worse. Humiliated by their slow progress, various European leaders started casting doubts on the efficacy of the AstraZeneca vaccine, claiming that there might be a link to blood clots. Even if such a link existed, halting the rollout would save, at most, tens of lives while costing thousands. But as far as we can tell, the link does not exist.
The number of people who have developed thrombosis after getting the jab is, allowing for age, actually lower than in the unvaccinated population. The EU’s regulator, the European Medicines Agency, said the vaccine is safe, a view shared by its British and American counterparts and by the World Health Organization. Yet EU leaders, similar to so many Iranian state propagandists, are spreading anti-vaccine doubts amid a pandemic.
“The bottom line, sadly, is that this good and effective vaccine is not being accepted by the public in many countries because of the row,” said Frank Ulrich Montgomery, the German head of the World Medical Association.
To summarize, the EU is threatening wartime requisitioning powers to seize a vaccine that it simultaneously claims is not safe. Truly, we are in kindergarten here: “Give me your vaccine! Gimme gimme gimme! Yeah, well, I never wanted your stupid vaccine anyway!”
But the Europeans are not merely switching from the one line to the other. They make both criticisms simultaneously.
Italy banned a consignment of the AstraZeneca vaccine from going to Australia on the grounds that it was needed at home while also seizing a different batch after a man died in Piedmont — of, it was later confirmed, unrelated causes.
“We got to the point of a suspension because several European countries, including Germany and France, preferred to interrupt vaccinations,” said Nicola Magrini, the head of Italy’s medicines authority. “The choice is a political one.”
So far, the U.K. has responded with restraint. British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said mildly that he is more accustomed to “team up with the EU when other countries with less democratic views than our own engage in that kind of brinkmanship.” Still, it is hard to avoid the sense that the EU is sliding into the worst kind of populist protectionism. And there is no reason to think it will stop when the virus recedes.
