Vaccine nationalism: Europe and the UK need to learn fast and say less
Kate Bingham, Chair of the Government's Vaccine Taskforce, starts her Novavax trial (PA Images)
As someone who believed, voted and campaigned for the UK to remain in the EU, and bears a certain number of scars for the effort, I think it would be retreating under fire if I said nothing about the current dispute over vaccines.
So, cards on the table first. The UK Government has played a blinder on vaccines. We know that in the public inquiry to come, and especially in the wake of the national trauma of 100,000-plus deaths, there will have been errors and miscalculations, to be soberly judged, in how the UK has performed in the exceptional circumstances we have been through. But on vaccines and vaccinations, it appears as though many lessons of earlier difficulties were learned.
It is becoming clear that individuals and their decisions matter. We owe a debt of gratitude to Kate Bingham, who headed up the vaccine task force, and who appears to have been the right person at the right time to have been in charge of procurement. Backed by unlimited resources put at her disposal — again, no accident but rather the right call by HMG — and given the discretion to negotiate, she used her considerable business acumen to choose the right spread of potential life-saving vaccines. They might not all be able to deliver, but if you bet on enough, you have the safety for citizens that is required.
By contrast, the EU response on vaccination has been poor. While its processes recognised the need for solidarity between richer and poorer nations, that admirable principle in itself seems to have got in the way of the more important one: just get hold of the bloody stuff.
The wrangling we are seeing now over contracts looks to the outsider like back-covering — and remember, I’m a friend of the EU. There seems to have been enough time for a deal to cover the essentials required, but a Commission decision to push back on liability and costs, no doubt perfectly reasonable in other circumstances, delayed the need for signing and certainty until three months after the UK’s nimbler decision-making process. The end result is a contract dispute between producers AstraZeneca and the Commission, while the elderly people of Paris and Turin wait outside empty vaccination centres reading the newspapers. This is not good enough, colleagues.
And of course, it is not just a contract dispute, but because this is an international process and the UK is where it is, unwise words that might imply threat are also out there. I needn’t detail. Readers will be aware of what has been said and Daniel Johnson’s excellent piece yesterday summed it up well, and is just a click away.
Rather, I would take the tack that this is an early test case for all sides. It is serious as a particular issue. I recall writing right at the start of all this, in company with other International Development former ministers and agencies, that a global pandemic is always on the cards, and we need to think quickly about how we deal with some of the practical issues and inequalities. With a virus which is indiscriminate, if all are not safe, then no one is safe. Our weakest points are not European delivery chains, they are the neglected health systems of countries without sustainability. I wonder how the row over how we divide up the millions of doses of vaccines rolling towards us looks to those in the poorest communities in the world, who do not know in which year they might receive any vaccine at all?
A further pandemic will happen again. We need to use the arguments about vaccine nationalism to think more widely and devise a global system to cope. Partly, and rightly, this should be for the moral argument, but partly, if you are that way inclined, also because some will not be able to go skiing with confidence for a few years if travel remains disrupted because Covid 19 or its derivatives are still killing people somewhere in the world.
The other lesson for the UK and the EU is how to handle what we are bound to see more of: the inevitable squabbles caused by Brexit. I would advise caution on all sides. While the triumphalism of some of the loudest advocates of Brexit is understandable — though, to their credit not, so far, the PM or Michael Gove — the tables will be turned one day on something. Equally the anger and bitterness of being on the wrong side of astute decision-making in the EU must not build into a dossier for revenge, either now or in the future. This is not a simple trade dispute. There are lives depending on the decisions being made, now and for some time to come.
Those, like Taiwan, who learned the lessons of SARS, understand what humility is in these circumstances. Learn fast, and say less.
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