Last April, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen added Europe to a global effort to ensure fair access to a vaccine, which she said ‘to every corner’ of the world ‘would be deployed.
But despite the pledge of billions of dollars for the World Health Organization (WHO) scheme, which has been publicly endorsed, European Union officials and member states have repeatedly made choices that undermine the campaign, internal documents that Reuters has seen and interviews with EU officials and diplomats. Show.
A year after its launch, Europe and the rest of the world will have to donate another single dose through the vaccine scheme, which is part of an unprecedented effort to spread vaccines, tests and drugs to fight the pandemic. Diplomats say Europe’s ambivalence stems in part from a shortage of supplies and a sluggish start to the global campaign, but also from concerns that the EU’s efforts will go unnoticed in a vaccination-diplomacy war, where many have published promises of China and Russia win the foundation, even in its own. back yard.
The program, led by international agencies and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI), is a bulk-purchasing platform for sharing doses worldwide. But with the administration of former US President Donald Trump blocking the back of the WHO, the plan, called COVAX, was slow to gain support and he focused on using funds from rich countries to reduce doses for less. developed countries for sale.
Von der Leyen presented Europe’s support for the COVAX campaign as a gesture of international unity. EU officials cast the vaccine targets of the bloc in a less altruistic light.
‘It’s also about visibility’, that is to say PR, Ilze Juhansone, Secretary-General of the European Commission and senior Commission official, told ambassadors at a meeting in Brussels in February, according to a diplomatic note what Reuters saw. Juhansone declined to comment.
A senior diplomat said many of those at the meeting believed that Europe, by far the largest exporter of vaccines in the West, had objectives that could be better served by putting ‘more blue flags with yellow stars’ on vaccines. patch and send out. itself, rather than by COVAX.
Brussels, which coordinates the vaccines with its members, has reserved a large surplus – so far 2.6 billion doses for a population of 450 million. It pledged almost 2.5 billion euros ($ 3 billion) in support to COVAX. This made the EU the largest funder until the government of US President Joe Biden allocated $ 4 billion to the plan this year, which aims to distribute 2 billion doses by the end of the year.
But the supply for Europe’s own population is behind schedule, and despite the allocation of funds, the EU and its 27 governments have also hampered COVAX in various ways. Like other rich countries, EU countries decided not to buy their own vaccines through COVAX, and competed to buy shots when stocks were low. All but Germany offered the total program less cash than requested.
Moreover, Europe has promoted a parallel vaccine donation system that it would manage itself to increase its EU profile.
“There is great frustration because there is a feeling that the race is currently underway, but we are not really away from the starting blocks,” a senior diplomat told Reuters.
“We spend money on COVAX and the return on political visibility is zero.”
Russia says it wants to deliver vaccines directly to countries. China pledged aid to COVAX. But both Moscow and Beijing have separate deals to deliver more than 1 billion doses to Africa, Latin America and to EU partners such as Turkey, Egypt, Morocco and the Balkan states who are candidates to join the bloc.
It will take time to deliver the most doses, but Russia and China have already made COVAX deliveries of about 40 million doses about twice.
COVAX was also hit in March by export restrictions on vaccines from India, which delayed the supplies of its main shot supplier.
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has repeatedly urged rich countries to set aside nationalist impulses and share vaccinations, calling the current situation a shocking imbalance. ‘Non-EU member Britain, for example, has already fired about as many shots as COVAX has delivered to more than 100 countries.
COVAX officials told Reuters they had received sufficient funds by the end of last year, but it came later than expected.
A spokesman for GAVI, the vaccine alliance that runs the scheme and spoke to COVAX on such issues, said EU support was “unambiguous” and that the dose would be donated soon. The WHO added that von der Leyen’s personal support was ‘invaluable’.
An EU Commission spokesman told Reuters COVAX was very successful in structuring global cooperation and securing millions of doses. He calls the program ‘our best means of delivering international vaccines’ and ‘the EU’s key channel for vaccine sharing’.
WAIT FOR COVAX
Part of COVAX’s problems are structural. Shortly after it was introduced, the richest countries were placing pre-orders with drug companies to get doses as they became available. The vaccination scheme has always relied on cash on rich states, which has given them sluggishness.
COVAX was aimed at being a platform for countries to buy vaccines, which would give it bargaining power and allow it to distribute doses among the needy worldwide. The recognition of the stock would be strict. The initial goal was to distribute doses to at least 20% of each country’s population to cover the people at greatest risk.
At an internal meeting last July, an EU Commission official told ambassadors that member states should not buy their shots through COVAX as it is coming too slowly, diplomatic notes show. The Commission later set the target of vaccinating 70% of adults in the EU by the end of September.
COVAX changed some of its provisions next month to try to persuade wealthy countries to participate, but no EU countries have signed up to use the platform for their vaccinations. The EU has given COVAX financial guarantees to pay for vaccines, but has also made it harder for COVAX to do so by arranging to buy far more doses than the bloc needs.
In November, the EU promised more money to COVAX, but only after signing contracts worth almost 1.5 billion doses with vaccine manufacturers – more than half of Brussels’ estimates of global production capacity for this year, internal documents show.
Although Europe has reserved such a large portion, the Commission told diplomats in a meeting this month that COVAX was too slow to obtain doses.
That was when the Commission raised the possibility of setting up its own mechanism to send shots to poor countries outside the EU.
“TEAM EUROPA”
France began expanding the plan within a month. Shots will be sent directly from manufacturers – possibly before deliveries are started by COVAX – and will be labeled ‘Team Europe’ donations, according to a draft plan.
The move, revealed by Reuters at the time, caused a stir among COVAX officials.
One told Reuters in April that the plan was driven by France’s desire to fire shots at Africa, where France had previously had colonies and encountered colonialism. French diplomats said they had never shown a preference for any country, and that Africa was most in need.
EU Health Commissioner Stella Kyriakides said in mid-January that the EU’s own plan would continue – because COVAX was not yet fully operational. Countries to focus on include the Western Balkans, the southern and eastern neighbors of the EU and Africa.
The EU reserved the next month, with more than 2 billion doses, but with actual deliveries hit by production problems, COVAX funding doubled to 1 billion euros. Russia and China have already delivered millions of doses around the world. COVAX has not yet delivered. And French President Emmanuel Macron has lost public patience.
Europe and the United States must send vaccines to Africa quickly enough to vaccinate health workers on the continent or lose influence over Russia and China, Macron said in a speech at a security conference without specifying how these donations should be made. .
Unless rich countries speed up delivery, “our friends in Africa will buy doses from the Chinese and Russians,” Macron told the conference. “And the strength of the West will be a concept and not a reality.”
Despite Macron’s urgency, France’s cash support for the overall WHO program – to cover tests and treatments as well as vaccines – was limited.
The WHO has asked countries for contributions in proportion to their economic power. France has pledged $ 190 million – about 13% of the $ 1.2 billion requested, according to a March 26 WHO document.
Other EU countries are also far below the expected contributions; some gave zero. But Germany helped offset that by promising $ 2.6 billion in public, well above the $ 2 billion requested.
French diplomats said the country’s contributions were expected to increase soon.
“FROM THIS GAME”
On February 24, COVAX shipped its first vaccines. The EU has softened its criticism.
At a meeting on March 9, at the height of the European Union’s difficulties in obtaining shots for its own citizens, a Commission official told diplomats that COVAX was the most important tool for donating vaccines to other countries.
But the official said Europe still needed its own mechanism because COVAX had money, but only a small portion of the shots it needed. And the EU scheme would ‘have the advantage of giving us invisibility’, the official said.
At the same meeting, the EU ambassadors were shown the data compiled by the EU’s foreign service and what those present said revealed how far the diploma of the vaccine is behind the competitors.
They learned that Russia had orders for 645 million doses of its Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccine from dozens of countries, and that China had sent millions of doses to EU neighbors, the data showed.
“We are completely out of the game,” one of the diplomats who was there told Reuters.
Reuters could not confirm the data exactly. But figures compiled by the United Nations agency UNICEF, which is working with COVAX on the delivery of vaccines, show that Russia has an agreement to deliver nearly 600 million doses, including to EU countries. China has deals to sell about 800 million doses, including agreements with European countries such as Serbia, Ukraine and Albania.
Later that month, EU top diplomat Josep Borrell made the point openly: “The EU is the main driver behind COVAX,” he wrote in a blog post on March 26. ‘But we do not get the recognition that the countries that use bilateral vaccine. do diplomacy. ‘
The European Commission said on Tuesday that from May, the EU will share more than half a million doses with Balkan countries through the EU scheme. It was two weeks after COVAX delivered its first shots in the region.
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