In defence of the EU's position on vaccines

Ursula von der Leyen addresses MEPs. Photograph: Daina LE LARDIC/European Parliament.

Your article (“What’s is Europe’s problem with the AstraZeneca jab?” TNE #236) is a good summary. It does, however, fail to mention two important points.

First that AZ undertook to supply its vaccine (which the EU has some claim to having had a hand in developing through research funding to Oxford university) and has three plants based in the EU, plus another that produces some of the base materials.

Secondly, it diverted vaccines produced in the EU to the UK to meet UK demand, but to do so, reduced what it was planning to supply to the EU. The EU has, therefore, some claim for breach of contract by AstraZeneca.

When coupled with the jeering and goading from the UK media, and the gaslighting by certain politicians who seem to treat any form of diplomacy in the same manner as a sixth-form public school common room point scoring exercise, it is perhaps understandable that some of the European response to the AZ failure to fulfil the contract is causing anger.
Patrick Cox, Taunusstein, Germany

The bout of EU-bashing that the government has indulged in, regarding its handling of the Covid pandemic, seems to go unchallenged in much of the British media and among opposition politicians, many of whom have readily joined in.

Intertwined issues have, admittedly, made the issue complex, but surely not too complicated to see that there is another side to the story.

The first issue is on the safety and efficacy of the AstraZeneca vaccine. It was not the EU which cast doubt on this: the European Medicines Agency has endorsed it. Rather, it was a number of individual countries around the world, both outside and inside the European Union, which suspended its use.

They may have overreacted, but it was those countries, not the EU, who did so.

The second is about supplies. Over 10 million doses have been exported from the EU to the UK, helping our vaccination drive. None have gone the other way. An objective observer would understand why they are upset.

Another issue is about joint procurement. To try to avoid a scramble where individual countries compete to secure their own contracts, leaving poorer and smaller countries behind, EU countries opted for joint procurement.

Last year, for PPE, that worked very well (it was Britain that seemed to lose out, when it could have joined in). This year, for vaccines, it hasn’t worked so well, and the Commission has been criticised.

Many mistakes have been made all around, but Britain, with one of the highest death rates of all, is not best placed to point accusatory fingers.
Richard Corbett (Leader, Labour MEPs 2017-2020)

We need constructive criticism in your pages of the Horlicks that the EU has made of the vaccine rollout. My mum is 77 and living in France and has only recently been vaccinated (Pfizer). I have been terribly worried and had she been living in the UK she would have been jabbed much earlier.

I am still a Remainer/Rejoiner but the EU and some of its constituent parts need to be held accountable for incompetence. As does the UK government in the form of a public enquiry for its overall handling of Covid.

Despite everything, my mum has probably been safer in France than she would have been in the UK.
Will Goble, Rayleigh

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