Just get on with it

The "progress" on vaccination in the EU countries has gone from drama, to farce, tragedy then pathos. 

Drama as the EU tried to strong arm AstraZeneca into delivering vaccines it wasn't able to make and to halt the export (and re-export) of vaccines from EU countries, including briefly threatening to suspend the Northern Ireland protocol, while simultaneously President Micron dissed the AstraZeneca vaccine as "quasi-ineffective" and, along with Germany said it wouldn't be used on the over 65s. Meanwhile the UK proceeded vaccinating apace.

Farce as we watched on BBC news as one person sat waiting to be jabbed in a huge vaccination centre (in Holland I think) with a member of staff coyly saying they weren't able to confirm why so few people were being vaccinated. The Daily Mail reported that in Delmenhorst, a German town of 75,000 people near Bremen, a quarter of the vaccination capacity was being used. At that rate it would take three years to give the town's population a single jab - presumably six years if they stuck with the two dose strategy.

Tragedy as it was revealed that a large proportion of the vaccine AZ has been able to deliver to France and Germany is sitting unused. Figures published included 1.4 million doses in store in Germany, 240,000 having been given to people while yesterday we learned only 24% of France's stock of the AZ vaccine had been used. 

Pathos as von der Leyen plaintively said she would happily receive the AZ vaccine if offered it and Angela Merkel said there was an "acceptance problem" in the EU over the AZ vaccine but she could not have it because she is 66. Then  France u-turned on the AZ vaccine, its regulators deciding they will make the AZ jab available to over 65s while its doctors blamed scepticism of the vaccine on "bad press" including Micron's remarks. And the head of Germany's vaccination committee said "we never criticised the vaccine, just the lack of data for the over 65 age group"  but " the whole thing has somehow gone wrong" .  Well whose fault might that be?

Plenty of them were at it. The French Europe Minister Clement Beaune had said there was "nothing to envy" in the achievements of Israel and the UK and that the British were taking "many risks in this vaccination campaign". And his countryman Jean Quatremer wrote in the Guardian "The UK's 'success' is really an illusion because to be fully effective the vaccine requires two doses... and only 0.8% of the UK population has received both shots, less than that of France". In other words, ya boo, we're winning really. 

Oh yes? I wonder what he's saying now the "real world" data coming through is showing how spectacularly effective the vaccines are, with the AZ version performing every bit as well as the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine? And after a single shot, too.

Having said that we should just pause to recognise that the UK's decision to go for a 12 week interval to double the initial speed of the vaccination roll out looks to have been a spectacularly good call. I've written previously that it was a science and logic based decision. It wasn't a difficult bit of sums to do in your head to prove that it was likely to save lives (well I had a go, didn't you?) but this argument came from Whitty and co despite strong representations from the BMA to stick with the 3 week interval. It also went against the advice of the vaccine producers who would not go outside the regime tested in clinical trials. Or at least that was their public position, we don't know what was being said privately based on the fairly obvious scientific assumption that if immunity was building nicely over 3 weeks it wasn't likely to immediately plummet thereafter.

The 12 week call certainly involved a degree of risk, probably more political than scientific. When 84 year old broadcaster and Labour peer Joan Bakewell instructed solicitors to start proceedings against the government on the grounds that "to delay the second dose of the Pfizer vaccine is potentially unlawful and unsafe" we knew we could all rest comfortably. After all, when was she last right about anything?

But as far as the EU is concerned this started out silly and has got sillier. Just what did Micron and the German ministers think was going to happen when they damned the AZ vaccine with the opposite of any kind of praise? France already had a large issue with vaccine doubt amongst its population, so no wonder its citizens are taking the proverbial step backwards when they are invited to come forward for a jab.

There may well now be a large reservoir of infection just across the channel when our case rates get back to low levels. That's bad enough in terms of risk, but more seriously if you lot don't get on with it we won't be able to go on holiday to southern Europe later in the year and and help to bail out their economies. You might laugh but, other than sending tourists, their EU "partners" like the Germans and Dutch don't do much to help the likes of the Greeks. Oh they twist their arms to take repayable interest bearing loans but there is no mechanism for wealth transfer by tax from the richer north to the poorer south. 

Unlike the UK where the richer south subs the regions, including Scotland via the Barnett formula. Yet bizarrely, Nicola Sturgeon thinks an independent Scotland could find "solidarity" with the EU. 

You wouldn't have got your vaccines, Nicola and you wouldn't get the money either.