Like many a noir thriller, it began in Berlin in winter: The night-train from Düsseldorf, morning papers aboard, rattling in on the Baltic freight line. Among tabloid, broadsheet and Berliner, a real humdinger – Exposed: the Anglo-Swedish racket at the centre of the latest row between London and Brussels. AstraZeneca hardly effective in seniors went the story. A tipoff from one anonymous source in the health ministry and a whole country awoke to Anton Karas on the zither. The double-dealing, the inferior product, the lives endangered – Germans could read all about it in the pages of Handelsblatt, breakfasting over a swindle that’d make Harry Lime blush. By the following day it had crawled onto the frontpage and – base pulp fiction that it was – won immediately a cult following. Popular recognition came with a great patron in the Palais d’Élysée: Quasi-ineffective said French President Emmanuel Macron of the AstraZeneca vaccine – meaning, incidentally, it compared favourably to EU vaccine production, vaccine procurement and vaccine distribution, all of which were ineffective in totum. But let not truth and frankness weigh down a box office doozy: the European Medicines Agency may have approved it for use in all age groups, but country after country reduced its AstraZeneca rollout – or suspended it outright.
Still, mediocre ou non, the EU needs all the vaccines it can lay its hands on. So when AstraZeneca told Brussels to make do with half-rations for a month or two, all hell broke loose at the European Commission. Health commissioner Stella Kyriakides insisted the EU would get what it was owed. At first AstraZeneca blamed an unspecified production problem at its manufacturing plant in Seneffe, Belgium. That didn’t wash. Kyriakides said four factories were included in the Commission’s contract with the firm – two of them in Britain. No production problem there – so no reason for AstraZeneca to fall down on its obligations. The EU threatened legal action. Poor Astra couldn’t take the heat – by dawn CEO Pascal Soriot was singing like a canary: It turned out London had his outfit over a barrel: first refusal agreements meant that – until British orders were met in full – jabs made in Britain stayed in Britain. For once, those in Downing Street sensed what was around the corner. First come, first served might work at the local butchers, Kyriakides observed, but not in the world of international purchase agreements. Bracing himself, Boris Johnson warned the EU against any disruption to Britain’s vaccine supply chain. Then the EU made its move: Any intention to export vaccines to third countries must henceforth be declared and permission sought from the relevant member state. At Seneffe, the site of AstraZeneca’s ‘production problem’, Belgium sent in the heavies. Regulators seized samples and company records. AstraZeneca stood accused of a bootlegging operation – a veritable Bandit Run for Boris. The plan: shift lorryloads of vaccine components from Belgium to Dover before the EU can introduce export controls. What a splendid caper.
Brussels wouldn’t be pulling any punches after that – but, all fire and fury, it let itself get carried away. On 29 January, the European Commission drew Article 16 of the Northern Ireland Protocol and pulled the trigger: that would mean checks at the Irish partition for goods passing from EU to UK territory. Cue uproar in London, opprobrium in Belfast – even Dublin spoke up. For the best part of five years, the European Commission had peddled the line that a post-Brexit hard border would spark war and revolution in Ireland. Now here was the Commission, caught up to by its first-act deceit. Having just put London on the defensive, now it was the one drawing heat. Brussels rowed back and apologised, but only after it’d taken a beating.
Thus our once vertiginous Europeans started down into the sewers of vaccine nationalism. Ahead of the curve, England was there already: Johnson, king of the rats, resplendent atop his prophylactic hoard. He knows Brexit dividends will be few and far between, and he’ll be damned if he doesn’t milk vaccine supremacy for every vote it’s worth. It might be worth less than he thinks. Britain’s vaccine strategy – much maligned in France but adopted in Germany – involves delivering as many first doses as possible, stretching the delay between first and second jabs to its outermost recommended limit. Britain’s rollout of second doses is reliant in part on orders placed with India’s Serum Institute. Only – facing an upsurge in domestic Covid cases – Delhi took a leaf out of London’s book and decided jabs made in India ought to stay in India. Later the same day, the EU tightened up its own guidance on vaccine exports: ‘In the case of a country of destination which has a large production capacity and restricts its own export of vaccines or substances – either by law or by other means – it may be appropriate to consider whether exports to this country are justified.’
Brexiteers rejoice. English autarky has arrived.
Patrick Casey
