By John Chalmers and Andrew MacAskill
BRUSSELS / LONDON (Officials) – EU officials admitted a “mistake” on Saturday when they addressed Northern Ireland’s Brexit emergency force during a showdown with Britain over vaccines, and London said it expected the supply of COVID-19 shots will not be interrupted.
The European Union fell far behind Britain and the United States in the race to vaccinate its public. It announced on Friday that it would impose export controls on vaccines, which are widely seen as a threat to prevent doses being sent to Britain.
But it had to reverse part of the announcement within hours, after both Britain and Ireland complained about plans to impose emergency export controls on vaccines across the Irish-Northern Ireland-controlled land border.
“They realized they had made a mistake and I believe we can now focus on making sure our vaccination program is successful,” Michael Gove, a senior British cabinet minister, told Sky News.
Britain’s foreign secretary Dominic Raab tweeted: “I was reassured that the EU has no desire to close suppliers that comply with vaccine distribution contracts to the UK.”
“The world is watching and it is only through international cooperation that we will defeat this pandemic.”
“Simple and easy a blunder”
EU officials acknowledged that the decision to call on emergency forces to control trade across the Northern Ireland border was a mistake. Preventing border controls has been a major issue in five years of Brexit negotiations.
“It is much better to realize early on that something can be a problem and change it, than to hold on and dig a hole for yourself,” an EU official said on Saturday.
“Once it became apparent that there would be a political difficulty and sensitivity, especially on the Irish and Northern Irish side, we decided to take it out.”
Another EU official called the drama “simply a blunder”.
EU politicians are under intense pressure to explain why their countries achieved only a fraction of the vaccinations achieved in Britain, which left the internal market four weeks ago.
EU officials were furious earlier this month when British-Swedish drugmaker AstraZeneca announced that most of the vaccine doses it promised to deliver to the EU by March would be delayed due to production problems in Belgium.
AstraZeneca has made millions of doses in Britain, but he has told the EU that he can lead nothing to the continent before fulfilling a contract with London. Meanwhile, Britain has imported EU-manufactured doses of a separate vaccine from Pfizer and BioNTech.
The EU on Friday announced regulations to control the export of vaccines, which are widely seen as an implicit threat to Pfizer shipments to Britain unless London shares its AstraZeneca shots.
But imposing restrictions on the Northern Ireland border was a bridge too far after five years of Brexit negotiations to keep it open. The issue is central to a 1988 peace agreement that ended 30 years of conflict in Northern Ireland.
Ireland’s European Affairs Minister Thomas Byrne said Dublin was not consulted during the move.
“This type of provision is standard in trade agreements, but in the Northern Ireland situation it obviously has a different political resonance and it may be that the drafters do not fully appreciate it,” he told Newstalk radio.
“A mistake was clearly made,” Byrne said.
(Additional reporting by Padraic Halpin in Dublin and Jan Strupczewski in Brussels; edited by Peter Graff)