Britain may feel the economic consequences of the EU's failure to inoculate its citizens, but currently the disease risk it poses is low.
Source - Daily Telegraph 24/03/21
Only a small minority of Europeans have yet contracted Covid-19 or been vaccinated against it. Given this fact, and how highly transmissible the virus is, this means there is now another wave of infections on the Continent. Desperate attempts to extend restrictions are being met by lockdown fatigue. Recriminations abound as the hospitals fill and the death toll mounts.
No wonder, then, that there is an effort to shift blame. More widespread vaccination could have been the answer but the EU did not start early enough. Legend on the Continent has it that AstraZeneca has met its supply schedule to the UK but is behind in supplying the EU. This is simply untrue. AstraZeneca got way behind here as well.
Last May, when the UK made its original agreement with the firm, we were supposed to receive 30 million doses during 2020. By September the production schedule was so behind that this had been downgraded to 4 million. In the end we didn’t begin rolling out the AstraZeneca vaccine until January 2021 (and indeed still seem not to have received 30 million even now). That lag did affect us – badly. If we had been able to start vaccinating millions of people per week in November, far fewer would have died in our December/January wave.
The EU now faces similar AstraZeneca production delays at Continental plants. It is not for the UK, having already had its supply severely delayed and many people die as a result, to have its supply slowed even further.
There is talk of the EU blocking Dutch AstraZeneca exports to Britain. We do not currently get supply from the Netherlands, though reportedly we might do so in the future. More careless EU talk of banning Pfizer exports has taken a back seat, as the company pointed out publicly that its EU production relies on materials supplied from the UK, so the EU is in no position to commandeer that supply chain.
None of these bans is likely to be implemented to an extent that aims at anything more than symbolism. Really they represent efforts by EU leaders to signal to their citizens that vaccine delays are not their fault and that the perfidious British are in some vague way to blame. One doubts such meaningless posturing will be of much comfort to European citizens as they face more lockdowns and prolonged risk of hospitalisation or death.
In Britain the headlines scream that we face the risk of a third wave imported from Europe. But with half our population going to have received one dose of an incredibly effective vaccine by the end of this month, with 25-30 per cent of us already having had the disease, and with strong restrictions in place even after we start easing lockdown, there is no real risk of this, barring a vaccine-escaping variant.
We may feel the political and economic implications of the Continent’s third wave, however: fewer exports for our firms, financial spillovers (if a new Eurozone crisis were to occur, for example). It may disrupt sports events here this summer (the European Football Championship), and our holiday plans. But as matters stand we face very little disease risk from there.
The vaccines work against all known variants. The evidence is that they are almost miraculously effective at stopping the disease causing serious ill-health, amazingly effective at preventing transmission, and that even onward transmission is likely to be impeded for those few vaccinated people who do become ill. Even with the disruption of imports from India and threats of blockades from the EU, Boris Johnson remains so confident that we will meet our target of vaccinating all adults by the end of July that he repeated it yesterday.
If the UK had opened up a little more from March 8, if the EU had not been so belligerent about vaccines, and if EU leaders had not so effectively spread anti-vaxxer myths about the AstraZeneca vaccine (and consequently damaged EU citizens' trust in it), there might well be pressure in the UK for us to send vaccines to help out Europe. It would have been reasonable to ask: Why are we vaccinating healthy 30-year-olds when 80-year-old Spanish, French and Czech citizens are dying? But there is now no argument for our risking any Summer exit wave of hospitalisations in Britain (even if it ought to be modest and manageable) by sending vaccines to the Continent that it simply will not use.
Europe's third wave is a tragedy, and we may face political, economic and cultural consequences. But it presents no current disease threat to us, no threat of disrupting our roadmap to relaxation, and, sadly, our ability to help is limited: even if we were to put our own citizens at greater risk by sending vaccines to the Continent, Europe's leaders seem incapable of using them.
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