BRUSSELS – The people on television were cheerful: Cheering Britons received the world’s first recordings of the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine in early December.
Less joyful were many people who watched in Germany, where the vaccine was created, but where the government told citizens that it would take weeks before they could start their own vaccination program.
“Millions get German vaccination, but we have to keep waiting”, reads the headline in the Berlin pony newspaper BZ “The World Is Vaccinating – Not Germany,” reads the news magazine Focus.
For Germans and other Europeans, it was particularly nice to see the United States and Britain, who were less disciplined in their locks and pandemic precautions, advance ahead in the vaccination race. In fact, former President Donald J. Trump and Prime Minister Boris Johnson have had all the more incentive to resort to vaccines, as their countries have been hit by one of the worst in the world.
There is no doubt that the European Union is taking many of the early steps to align vaccines. It was slower from the point of view, too focused on pricing, while the United States and Britain made dollars and pounds no object, and this yielded to an abundance of prudent regulations. All of this has left the block flat-footed while drugmakers lag behind on their promised orders.
But the 27 countries of the European Union are also trying something they have never tried before and have broken another barrier in their deeper integration – albeit shaky – by choosing to throw their lot together in the vaccination hunt.
In doing so, they reversed the normal power equation of the block. Larger, richer countries such as Germany and France – as the United States and Britain could do to sign contracts directly with drug manufacturers – have seen their vaccination campaigns delayed by the more cumbersome joint effort, while smaller countries end up with better supply conditions than they probably would. negotiated on their own.
For most EU countries, the experiment was beneficial. But it was not necessarily happily greeted in the backward richest countries, and it has opened up to leaders such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron for home criticism.
They and EU leaders nonetheless stood by their decision and the impetus for solidarity, even as the finger-pointing began.
‘What would people have said if Germany and France were competing with each other for the purchase or manufacture of vaccines? It would have been chaos, ‘said Mr. Macron said at a news conference on Friday after a virtual meeting with Ms. Merkel. “It would have been counterproductive economically and from the point of view of public health, because we will only get out of this pandemic if we have vaccinated enough people in Europe.”
But even while the leaders of Europe’s traditional power duo discussed the 2.3 billion doses as an indication of the wisdom of a joint approach, they conceded that a full campaign could not be expected before March, which the block would leave in controversy and accusation, and perhaps a little regret.
With just over 3 per cent of EU citizens receiving at least one dose of vaccine at the end of last week, in stark contrast to Britain’s 17 per cent and the United States’ 9 per cent, the delay is nowhere greater than in Germany, block s largest economy and de facto leader.
“I should have called the hotline 100 times,” said Klaus Kater, 80, a retired lawyer in Germany. He spent two days calling again before being able to go to health officials in his home country of Lower Saxony.
His efforts landed him on a waiting list, he said. “They asked me how to notify me when it was my turn. That’s why I said I should send a letter just to be safe. ‘ He had no idea when it could be.
To be sure, not all problems – such as interrupted telephone lines – are the fault of the European Union. But as frustrations escalated, the bloc became an easy whip-boy for all sorts of vaccine-related issues that it didn’t have to solve in the first place.
Experts believe that Germany might have been able to get vaccinations for its people faster if it had acted on its own, but in the end it would have been a disaster to abandon the EU’s joint effort in many other ways.
“It would have been a disaster for Germany to break down politically from the joint acquisition, but also economically if Germany alone had secured the vaccine and not the rest,” said Guntram Wolff, director of the Brussels research institute Bruegel.
Mr. Wolff added that the fact that Germany was the core of the public labor market in Europe, and that he shared borders with nine other countries, to ensure that the whole vaccine gets vaccinated, is not only a matter of politics, but also of self-interest.
“Most of the EU countries would have found it very difficult to negotiate the contracts and secure the offer themselves,” he said. Wolff said. “And I think the pharmaceutical companies themselves, they also prefer the centralized approach.”
Still, it’s me. Merkel struggled to defend the government’s decision to give Germany the opportunity to obtain its own vaccine.
In March 2020, when Italians died on trays outside overwhelming hospitals, the German and French governments blocked the export of essential protective equipment such as masks.
It was a disastrous moment for Europe, one that its leaders quickly decided not to repeat, as the pandemic took possession of the bloc’s economy and closed its societies, leaving Britain to leave the union after four years. of painful negotiations.
Public health is usually handled by individual Member States, but it has been decided to allow the European Commission, the very bad, stuffy, administrative arm in Brussels, to lead the European Commission to secure vaccine negotiations.
By that time it was June, and Europe had been four months behind the United States and three behind Britain approaching pharmaceutical companies.
More recently, the vaccine race, whether or not, has been viewed through the prism of Brexit. The Johnson government in particular cited its lead in vaccine distribution as proof that formal exit from the bloc at the start of the new year was the right thing to do.
This has put Britain and the European Union in a minimum of competition, and has increased the country’s increasing performance as the British-Swedish firm AstraZeneca Brussels announced in January that it would reduce its planned vaccines to the block due to production problems, while it Britain the full order.
EU officials accused the company of prioritizing its home country, while AstraZeneca said Britain’s three-month lead in orders had given the company time to iron out production errors, similar to those offered by the EU. now experienced.
To appease critics, Mrs. Merkel decides to explain the problems with vaccine production to the public and point to more production facilities in the United States and Britain as reasons why the countries started their campaigns earlier.
“I don’t think anything went wrong in general,” she said. Merkel told public broadcaster ARD on Tuesday, a day after the meeting. “Of course the question arises: Why is the United States faster, why is Israel faster, why is the United Kingdom faster? It ranks, of course, ”she added without giving an answer.
Other top European leaders have tried to continue the turmoil of the past few weeks around derailed vaccines.
Since the bloc’s confrontation with AstraZeneca, in which it adopted protectionist measures to suppress the company and almost already implemented fragile relations with Britain, a more forward-looking sense of self-reflection and action has taken hold in Brussels.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who has come under severe personal criticism for her handling of the vaccine procurement process, conceded that Europe had discounted how difficult vaccine production would be.
“A start of vaccination does not mean a seamless flow of vaccine doses coming from the industry,” she said. Von der Leyen told European news organizations this month. “It’s a bitterly learned part, and it certainly underestimated us.”
Mevr. Von der Leyen also hired Moncef Slaoui, a Belgian-American senior pharmaceutical executive who worked on the US operation Warp Speed, as a consultant, and European leaders tried to gently push her in the direction of a more proactive approach with the new vaccines. showing promising signs.
Vaccination is complicated, as the left-wing Süddeutsche Zeitung of Germany wrote in an editorial, adding that the government’s actual failure was a failure to communicate it effectively to the public.
“Germany shares the fate of the slow pace of vaccination with the rest of the world, with very few exceptions,” the newspaper wrote in an editorial on Tuesday. “Despite all the impatience and exhaustion, even science and technology have limits.”
Despite political thoughts pointing to a “wrong-made, learned lesson” moment for the European Commission, the hardest part of correcting the bloc and getting the vaccine quickly is the attitude within the institutions that drives the process , change.
“I want to say that when we try to constantly compare with the US, we should have no complex,” the commission’s top vaccination official and head of his health department, Sandra Gallina, said in a parliamentary hearing last week.
“I’m not jealous of what Biden is doing, because the situation here in Europe is, may I say, better,” she said.
Matina Stevis-Gridneff reported from Brussels and Melissa Eddy from Berlin. Monika Pronczuk contribution made.