Britain should ignore Brussels braggadocio: jaw-jaw is better than ‘jab war’
Stella,Kyriakides (Shutterstock)
Trade disputes have a habit of escalating rapidly. Churchill said “meeting jaw to jaw is better than war” (often misquoted as “jaw-jaw, not war-war”) and this is no less true in a pandemic, when medical supplies are a matter of life and death. TheArticle was among the first to warn of an impending “jab war” between the EU and the UK over Covid vaccines.
Sure enough, within a couple of days we now have Peter Liese, a senior German MEP on the health committee of the European Parliament, warning on Euronews that if EU citizens were “treated as second class by a UK-based company, I think the only consequence can be to immediately stop the export of BioNTech. Then we are in the middle of a trade war. So the company and the UK better think twice.”
Politicians often talk tough to impress their supporters, but unfortunately the EU Commission has also raised the temperature. Stella Kyriakides, the Health Commissioner, has threatened to retaliate if the EU does not receive the promised quantity of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine on time. She insists that the EU contract must be honoured to the letter, even if this means supplies being diverted from Britain to the Continent. Despite having agreed terms with AstraZeneca three months later than the UK, Ms Kyriakides dismisses “the logic of ‘first come, first served’. That may work at the neighbourhood butcher but not in a contract. In our contract it is not specified that any country or the UK has priority because it signed earlier.”
Such aggressive rhetoric is in marked contrast to the emollient tone adopted both by AstraZeneca, which claims that its talks with the Commission have been “constructive”, and the Prime Minister, who called for the distribution of vaccines, like their creation, to be “great multinational, international effort”. But AstraZeneca is actually under no obligation to submit to bullying. Its contract with the EU includes a “best effort” clause, meaning that it will endeavour to fulfill the order, but only if circumstances allow. Production difficulties at its Belgian facilities are, it says, beyond the company’s control.
In the Times, an unnamed pharmaceutical industry source rejects the “political rhetoric” in Brussels as an empty threat: “They cannot stop vaccines that are contracted for delivery. Some of these vaccines have already been given to people who are due to receive their second dose. It would be a human rights issue for millions of people if that process was stopped.” Such humanitarian considerations would apply to the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine no less than the Oxford-AstraZeneca one.
A reality check is evidently needed here. In the first place, the EU’s regulator hasn’t even authorised the use of the Oxford vaccine yet. Having procrastinated for two months longer than its British counterpart, they are expected to license it next week. In advance of this, however, a malicious report appeared in the respected Düsseldorf newspaper Handelsblatt, claiming that the Oxford vaccine was only eight per cent effective against Covid for older patients. Though this report was immediately rejected by the German Health Ministry and scientists at Oxford, it has been widely circulated among anti-vaxxers and the damage has been done.
Secondly, it has yet to be widely acknowledged on the Continent that AstraZeneca is making no profit on its vaccine. In order to facilitate its worldwide distribution, the company agreed with its shareholders and scientific partners at Oxford to price each dose at cost, making it much cheaper than the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines. This is an extraordinary gesture of global solidarity with the victims of the coronavirus, especially those in poorer countries outside Europe and North America. AstraZeneca’s allocation of 17 per cent of production to the EU, when Europe has only 5 per cent of the world’s population, is scarcely treating Europeans as “second class citizens”.
There is a third point to bear in mind. The implication in Brussels that the main limitation on the EU’s vaccination programme is a shortage of supplies is based on a fallacy. It is true that the Commission’s record on procurement has been widely criticised, but there is no real risk that supplies will run out. The French pharmaceutical giant Sanofi, for example, has abandoned development of its own vaccine in order to concentrate on boosting production of those already in use. Given the very slow rate of vaccination across the Continent, especially in France, this decision is clearly the right one, even though the company (which has a British CEO) has come under fire from Left and Right for its alleged failure to live up to the tradition of Louis Pasteur, the 19th-century pioneer of vaccination and pasteurisation.
As for the UK, the Times reports that the Government has ordered a total of 367 million doses of all vaccines — enough for 5.5 per person in the UK. Any surplus was always intended to be donated to poorer countries. (In such altruism, Norway and the UK are thus far alone in Europe.) So if the EU were to launch a “jab war” by banning vaccine exports to the UK, not only would it be open to legal action and potentially vast compensation claims, but the UK could still continue to vaccinate its population. The underlying cause of the tension between Brussels and London is the widening disparity between the two inoculation programmes — the EU has given first jabs to just over 2 per cent of its population, the UK to more than 13 per cent.
And then, of course, there is the legacy of Brexit. We have already noted an undertone of hostility in political discourse across the Channel: Angela Merkel has spoken of “the British virus” when referring to the variant first identified in Kent, while there has been little sign of sympathy this week for the people of a country where the death toll has passed 100,000. In normal times one might expect neighbours in the same predicament to eschew protectionist braggadocio. Alas, the combination of Brexit and Covid seems to have generated a tendency to treat the British as a scapegoat. So far, this tendency is more evident in Brussels than in Paris, Berlin or other major capitals — perhaps because it is the EU’s reputation, rather than that of the member states, that is now on the line. London’s response so far has been measured; rightly so. A jab war would benefit nobody. Thus far, the UK has occupied the moral high ground. Let’s hope our more volatile politicians keep it that way.
