European unity among the latest casualties of Covid

On paper, the EU is well prepared to ensure the protection of its 450 million citizens from the Covid-19 virus now ravaging the Continent. By late December, the European Commission, acting on behalf of all 27 member states, had ordered a total of 2.47 billion doses of vaccine from seven different manufacturers.

That’s enough to provide every one of its citizens with a cocktail of five doses each. Just this week, it announced a further order of 300 million doses of the top-rated BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine.

Sadly, Covid is not likely to be defeated on paper, and in practice the EU is falling far behind in its bid to keep up with progress around the world.

The problem was, and remains, structural. Michael Gove may be surprised to learn this, but the EU does not have responsibility for healthcare. There is no such thing as a European Health Service. The Greek Commissioner, Stella Kyriakides, is nominally responsible for issues involving health, but her primary area of concern is food safety – an entirely different kettle of fish. Oversight of medicines was tacked on to her brief in order that someone in Brussels should answer for the work of the European Medicines Agency, a regulatory body, now based in Amsterdam after moving out of London in the wake of Brexit.

When Covid struck last March, Europe’s nation states looked to Brussels for a lead. Ursula von der Leyen, the new Commission President responded by undertaking to secure everything that was needed to tackle the virus, from masks, to PPE, to vaccines. By separating procurement from diagnosis and treatment, the health services of the 27 would, it was argued, be free to concentrate on what they did best, leaving warehousing and distribution to the Centre.

As to where the supplies are held, nobody seems to know. Do they even exist? Everything is on order, but precious little has actually arrived at the front lines – hospitals, doctors’ surgeries and care homes.

Sandra Gallina, a trade specialist brought in to head the Commission’s Covid procurement programme, insisted this week that Brussels had built sufficient supplies of vaccine and was ready to deliver what was needed in good time. She rejected claims, originating in Germany, that not enough had been purchased or made available.

“We bought as much as was offered,” she told MEPs. “If I buy billions of doses, but they are not delivered, what’s the use?”

Bureaucracy at the national level has also played its part. In France, for example, the roll-out of vaccines has been delayed and delayed even as the number of cases, and deaths, have continued to rise.

Currently, in France, only residents and staff in certain categories of state-run care homes, as well as doctors, nurses and other medical professionals are eligible for the jab. Those over 75 will have to wait unitl this Friday at the earliest. To speed things up, the health ministry has partnered with a medical app, known as Doctolib, which most people don’t have and many haven’t even heard of.

The plan is that there should be 600 vaccination centres up and running by the end of January, but as of today most of the French, especially the old and infirm, have no clear idea where to go, who is on the list or how to apply. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, 60 per cent of the French, according to the latest poll, are anti-vaxers who will refuse to accept the needle.

In Germany, as you might expect, procedures are better advertised and better understood. But, with the number of deaths from what is now the third wave increasing sharply, there is a shortage of available vaccine – so much so that state governments are importing supplies from Israel via Cyprus.

Elsewhere, the delinquent states of Poland and Hungary, while demanding more and more financial assistance from Brussels, are importing the Russian vaccine, Sputnik 5.

So chaotic and uncertain has the situation become that Commissioner Kyriadkides felt obliged to warn health ministers of the 27 this week via an emergency video conference that, while she understood the pressures they were under, it was vital that they let the pan-European approach “bear fruit”.

Logistics and politics aside, coronavirus casualties are mounting fast. The UK still remains the worst affected country in Europe, with, at the last count, a death toll approaching 85,000. But other countries are catching up. Across the EU, up to 7 January, the number of diagnosed cases had reached more than 15.8 million, resulting in a total of 380,000 deaths.

In France, more than 69,000 have died; in Germany (previously the safest country in Europe) 44,000; in Italy, 80,000; Spain, 53,000; Poland 32,000; the Netherlands,13,000; and Belgium 21,000. Vaccinations across the EU only began, officially, on 27 December and in most instances have made slow progress.

Nevertheless, President Emmanuel Macron of France and the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, both remain, in their ways, Euro-loyalists, with each insisting that the Brussels route is the way to go.

The tendency to denote the latest form of Covid as in some sense British is widespread. The French daily Le Parisien today reported that the “variant Britannique” is now present in 50 countries around the world – as if the UK had single-handedly set out to infect as many nations as possible as part of its post-Brexit global trade drive.

Mark Rutte, the Dutch prime minister, noted that the “UK variant” was causing serious problems. “The images from London, and also from Ireland, are alarming,” he said today.

The situation in Ireland is indeed worsening. The total number of deaths from Covid in the Republic today rose above 2,400, still less than half the incidence, pro rata, recorded in Britain, but with a distinct, and worrying, sting in the tail. Forty-six people died on Tuesday, the highest daily total for nine months. In County Monaghan, one of the “lost” Ulster counties, one in eight of the population has the virus.

On the other side of the Border, 91,000 cases of Covid have so far been diagnosed, with a death toll slightly in excess of 1,500. Given that the population of Northern Ireland, at some 1.8 million, is 37 per cent that of the Republic, the South is actually doing well. But the two jurisdictions, like England and Scotland, are inextricably linked, so that close cooperation between Dublin and Belfast remains essential.

But nil desperandum. The European Medicines Agency has got this one. It is mobilising its own resources and cooperating with its regulatory partners “to ensure that safe and effective vaccines reach patients as soon as possible”.