How Europe dodges responsibility for its vaccine fiasco

AT THE ENDEUEUEUEUEU of December, a smiling Ursula von der Leyen appeared in front of a camera to hail the beginning of the ’s vaccination programme. The president of the European Commission boasted that from Sofia to Helsinki Europeans were being jabbed with drugs bought collectively and then divvied up by the commission. It was, she beamed, “a touching moment of unity and a European success story”. A month later, the smiles have vanished. The has vaccinated a much smaller proportion of its people than America, Britain or Israel has done. The programme has been dogged by a lack of doses and clunky roll-outs. Supply problems hit when AstraZeneca, an Anglo-Swedish drug firm, warned that it would provide less than half of the 80m doses it had pledged to the in the first quarter of the year. A touching moment has become a tortuous one and the blame game has begun. Where does the responsibility lie?Start with the body Mrs von der Leyen heads: the commission. It took months to sign contracts for covid-19 vaccines, something that could have been done in weeks. Shrugging off liability—ensuring that the drug firms were on the hook should anything go wrong—was prioritised over speedy delivery. The row with AstraZeneca was badly handled. In a mix of institutional panic and fury, Mrs von der Leyen demanded export controls on any vaccines heading out of the . This threat of a blockade led to concern from Tokyo to Ottawa, rather undermining the ’s claim to be the doughtiest defender of the rules-based trading system. A plan to block exports to Northern Ireland using a mechanism in the Brexit deal that is widely seen as a nuclear option was revealed and then dropped via a midnight press release. To cap it all, while trying to apologise for blundering into Northern Ireland’s conflict between Protestants and Catholics, the commission’s spokesman uttered a world-class gaffe: “Only the pope is infallible.”