Photographer: Alex Kraus / Bloomberg
Photographer: Alex Kraus / Bloomberg
Angela Merkel starts cracking under pressure from Germany’s shaky program for vaccination against coronavirus.
With the Chancellor publicly under fire due to a lack of Covid-19 shots and her strategy of taking responsibility for the While the European Union may seem misleading, she clipped during a closed-door meeting in early January when asked by German state prime ministers for answers.
She became more angry than the people involved had ever seen, threatening to retaliate and expose the officials’ mistakes and shock the participants in silence. On other occasions, she has come close to tears in public over the past few weeks.
Angela Merkel arrives on January 21 for a news conference on Covid-19 in Berlin.
Photographer: Michael Kappeler / POOL / AFP / Getty Images
“It breaks my heart to see how many people have died in loneliness in parental homes,” she said in a recent speech.
Such emotions are very unusual for the sober physicist, who has infallibly confronted one crisis after another in her 15 years at the helm of Europe’s largest economy. But as she prepares to hand over the chancellorship after the September election, the pandemic seems to be getting away from her. A poll released last week confirms this. Only 11% of respondents thought that the vaccine program of Germany was going well, while 61% had major shortcomings with the implementation.
A reconstruction of the events for this story, based on information from government officials who asked not to be identified and discussed the private conversations within the chancellery, shows that the country’s vaccine stumbles with Merkel’s handshake. Her European focus fueled conflict within the German government, while relying on an overload The European Commission has hampered implementation. A government spokesman declined to comment on the internal consultation.
The tension created a showdown in Brussels. The EU adopts AstraZeneca Plc and other pharmaceutical companies, and institute export controls in an all-or-nothing response to their alleged failures.
EU lags behind vaccine race
Cumulative doses administered per 100 people
Source: Data Collected by Bloomberg
Germany’s effort started well enough. Merkel’s government supported the development of the vaccine at an early stage and thus gained a leap in other countries.
In April, Health Minister Jens Spahn – Merkel’s longtime opponent – contacted BioNTech SE and offered financial assistance. In September, the German start up 375 million euros ($ 450 million) in research funding, about three times as much as it is public listing late end 2019. In June, Germany invested 300 million euros in another German start up, CureVac NV, the acquisition of an interest and the repulsion of an approach by the Trump administration.
But behind the scenes, a political struggle has struggled.
Spahn had long been a thorn in the chancellor’s side. The ambitious 40-year-old Conservative has been an outspoken critic of her refugee policy and in 2018 was only reluctantly offered in her cabinet. The coronavirus crisis gave him a chance to raise his profile, and he intended to tackle it.
Angela Merkel and Jens Spahn on January 13 at the Bundestag.
Photographer: John MacDougall / AFP / Getty Images
During the first weeks of the pandemic, Spahn held press conferences almost daily until the chancellor told him to step out of the spotlight. In mid-March, Merkel put the crisis under her wing, and the relatively mild closure of Germany contained the spread. The impression was that Merkel had saved the day again.
Flooding with success, she looked to Germany’s EU presidency in the second half of 2020. There were major issues to tackle such as the tough Brexit negotiations and the landmark recovery fund.
But Spahn remains active. In June, he concluded a vaccine alliance with France, Italy and the Netherlands. The goal was to secure as many doses as possible, and on June 13, the group signed a preliminary contract with 400 million shots with AstraZeneca. What could have been good news has caused alarms in Berlin and Brussels.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has called on the chancellery to end Spahn’s alliance. Merkel’s former defense minister made it clear to the chancellor that Spahn’s attempt could overshadow Germany’s EU presidency.
As a dedicated multilateralist, she did not want to remember that Germans were saved at the expense of the rest of the EU. Shortly afterwards, Spahn effectively apologized for the initiative.
“We think it makes sense for the commission to take the lead in this process,” Spahn and his three counterparts said in the letter – which was leaked to the media in January as part of a pressure campaign on Merkel.
Visitors are waiting to receive doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine at a vaccination site in Würzburg, Germany.
Photographer: Alex Kraus / Bloomberg
Meanwhile, the US is throwing money around as part of Operation Warp Speed. In May, the Trump administration promised as much as $ 1.2 billion in funding for the AstraZeneca vaccine project. In July, the US agreed to pay $ 1.95 billion for 100 million doses of BioNTech vaccine, with an option to obtain an additional 500 million.
Almost simultaneously with the US agreement, the UK also agreed to buy 30 million doses of BioNTech and its partner Pfizer Inc.
Read more: Drunk EU vaccine Roll out Risks another existing crisis
Little happened in Brussels. In July, the Commission announced a BioNTech offer for 500 million doses amid the price and concerns over the super-cold storage of the shots.
By the end of the summer, the chancellery was increasingly concerned about the slow progress, and Merkel asked von der Leyen to speed things up. At the end of August, the Commission signed an agreement with AstraZeneca.
It was not until November 20 that an EU agreement with BioNTech was finalized, 11 days after the company announced that its vaccine candidate was more than 90% effective in clinical trials.
Even that was a struggle. Germany had to guarantee that it would last to 100 million doses and 192 million euros added to the pot of EU virus money. But as more studies have underscored the benefits of the shot, other member states have lined up, and Germany’s grant has more than halved.
Meanwhile, a bilateral agreement signed by Spahn with BioNTech on September 8 for 30 million doses, exclusively for Germany, was caught in red tape.
Leading the pack
Germany’s Conservatives are ahead of the polls, but the gap is narrowing
Source: Infratest dimap
“The process in Europe has certainly not been as fast and straightforward as with other countries,” said Ugur Sahin, CEO of BioNTech. Spiegel magazine, blaming the burdensome bureaucracy of the EU and a careless approach. “There was apparently an attitude of: we will get enough, it will not be so bad, we have everything under control.”
While the EU’s procurement process was sputtering, Merkel was introducing herself as an advocate for fair vaccine. In June, she announced that Germany would provide 600 million euros to the Gavi Alliance, plus 100 million euros for developing countries.
The global approach makes sense from a scientific point of view, and there is still a long way to go that Germany – even better off than many other countries – can recover.
Only on November 20, an EU agreement with BioNTech was finalized.
Photographer: Alex Kraus / Bloomberg
But politically, it made her allies cringe, especially as they looked ahead to the September election. Bavarian head of state Markus Soeder – a leading rival to succeed her as chancellor – supported Merkel’s European course, but noticed: “It is also not wrong to care for your own country.”
To ease tensions, Merkel is holding a German vaccination stop on Monday, but the pressure remains palpable. When she was recently asked if she would be willing to apologize for the mistakes, she deviated and rather responded with a lecture on the complex production process, including the role of saline solution.
“Of course we could have ordered more earlier,” Spahn said Friday, refusing to point the finger at Merkel or anyone else in public. “It’s the virus that’s our opponent, not the pharmaceutical industry and not each other.”
– With the help of Raymond Colitt and Hayley Warren