The vaccination rollout has been plagued by bureaucratic sclerosis, poorly-negotiated contracts, penny-pinching and blame shifting all wrapped in a shroud of secrecy. The result is a needless and embarrassing shortage of vaccines, and yet another a crisis of legitimacy for the EU. The European Commission ordered too late, limited its focus to only a few pharmaceutical companies, agreed on a price in a typically bureaucratic EU manner and completely underestimated the fundamental importance of the situation. We now have a situation where grandchildren in Israel are already vaccinated but the grandparents here are still waiting. That s just completely wrong. Markus Söder, Bavarian premier and possible future German chancellor.
Even Jean-Claude Juncker, the former president of the European Commission, has seen fit to criticise the body he once led over its mismanagement and slowness in the procurement of Covid vaccines. He
Vaccine Fiasco Marks ‘Beginning of End of EU’, Says Farage
3 Feb 2021
Brexit leader Nigel Farage has said that the European Commission’s disastrous handling of the bloc’s vaccination programme marks “the beginning of the end of the European Union as we know it”.
European media has continued to criticise Commission President Ursula von der Leyen for leading the EU’s failing vaccination programme. Only around three per cent of the EU27’s population is inoculated on average. In contrast, Brexit Britain, which signed contracts with drugs firms such as AstraZeneca months before Brussels, has protected more than 14 per cent of its inhabitants.
2 Feb 2021
After struggling to apportion blame for the bloc’s disastrous inoculation programme on drugs company AstraZeneca, Ursula von der Leyen has now taken to claiming that the EU should be proud of being so far behind the United Kingdom, implying that Brexit Britain had compromised on safety to become the Western world’s first to approve a vaccine for the Chinese coronavirus.
The president of the European Commission, the EU’s powerful executive arm, has been criticised at home for overseeing the delays in securing contracts with drugs companies which have resulted in fewer than three per cent on average of EU-27 residents receiving their first dose. In contrast, the UK has injected almost 14.5 per cent.