Hats off to the European Commission. It takes supreme political skill to unite the DUP, Sinn Fein, the Guardian, the Daily Express, the entire Tory party, the Irish prime minister and even the EU’s own Michel Barnier. Yet unite them they have with Friday’s preposterous decision to override parts of the Northern Ireland Protocol, the sense of farce only enhanced by an immediate and furious Brussels row-back. Journalists were briefed that this was a lapse of judgment from ‘someone who did not understand the political implications’, as if a hapless apparatchik had accidentally tripped and fallen on a button marked ‘Article 16’. Oops.
Nor should that faux pas distract from the myriad other deflections and excuses the Commission has been peddling in recent days and weeks. When they haven’t been attacking Pharma companies for supposedly welching on deals, much of the EU’s ire has been aimed at the UK, whose vaccinating efforts have been embarrassingly competent for a country dubbed ‘plague island’ in the smugger recesses of the international press.
First our regulator, the MHRA, was accused of rushing through approvals, then some suggested the UK was getting inferior vaccines. Now Emmanuel Macron says the AstraZeneca jab is ‘quasi-ineffective’ for over-65s – a claim Oxford University’s professor of medicine, Dr John Bell, described as ‘demand management’ from the French president. The introduction of export controls on jabs produced in EU member states only speaks to the palpable sense of desperation emanating from Berlaymont. (Quite why Macron feels now is the time to be pontificating about Britain’s place in the world is particularly baffling.)
For all those slings and arrows, the UK has already vaccinated just shy of 8.5 million people, around 20% of the adult population and over half of the most at-risk groups Boris Johnson wants to immunise by mid-February. As I wrote a few weeks ago, going it alone on vaccines is proving an immediate, tangible benefit of Brexit, as well as showing how a nimble Britain might succeed even in a world of trade superpowers.
Still, however fun it may be, let’s resist the temptation to indulge in too much vaccine schadenfreude. We’re still having a pretty ghastly pandemic ourselves, passing 100,000 deaths this week and with an economy in near-stasis and most of the things we enjoy off limits.
It was only this week, arguably 10 months late, that the Government decided to impose the kind of strict quarantine many Asian countries have long had in place. And even then, the ever-expanding ‘red list’ of countries feels like a half-measure, with obvious loopholes for travellers with a bit of nous to avoid isolating. That kind of skittish approach has characterised too much of the Covid response, though I suspect Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick is right to say most people don’t want to engage in a public reckoning while we’re still in the throes of the pandemic.
Still, whatever the Government’s other mistakes, the fact remains that vaccine rollout has been an almost unmitigated success. Once derided by opposition politicians and much of the commentariat, venture capitalist Kate Bingham deserves a gong of some sort for her stewardship of the programme.
Faced with the EU’s jibes and attempts at misdirection, and calls from the WHO to pause the vaccine programme, the best thing the UK can do is keep calm and carry on jabbing. Some might call that ‘vaccine nationalism’. Most punters will call it common sense.
