Coronavirus: the supply of vaccines, the new battle front between the UK and the EU

The supply of vaccines against the coronavirus has become the new battle front between the European Union and the United Kingdom, in a bitter controversy which has at the center the laboratory AstraZeneca, accused of diverting doses to London which were supposed to reach the countries of the block.

EU officials accused the Anglo-Swedish pharmaceutical company of delivering only a quarter of the doses it had promised for the first quarter of 2021 and disclosed parts of the contract that binds the two factories the company has in the UK to “contribute to the effort” to deliver the drug.

Faced with accusations of alleged non-compliance with the supply of up to 400 million doses, the CEO of the laboratory, Pascal Soriot, clarified that the contracts did not provide for “commitment” on the supply of vaccines.

Against the backdrop of this dispute is one of the strong letters that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson uses to praise the Brexit he was so active on: the vaccination campaign is proceeding at an accelerated pace with nearly 7 , 5 million inhabitants who received the least the first dose, while in France this figure does not reach 1.2 million and in Germany 1.8 million.

The UK was the first Western country to approve and administer the Pfizer / BioNtech vaccine and subsequently approved the AstraZeneca and Moderna vaccines, while in the EU this process slows down as authorization depends on the body of regulations, the European Medicines Agency.

Despite this, Nick Hopkinson, a member of the European Movement in the UK, an organization that promotes links with the continent, denied in an interview with Telam that the vaccination campaign is a strong case for Brexit.

“If being a newly independent sovereign state positively influenced our performance in the event of a pandemic, then this factor should also be responsible for the highest Covid-19 death rate in the world,” he said.

“Vaccine nationalism may work well here, but the UK has been shown to be able to speed up the approval of the Pfizer vaccine under EU rules and the vaccines have been developed by multinational workers.” , he pleaded in favor of integration.

As a December 6 editorial in The Observer noted: “Pfizer / BioNtech vaccines were developed in Germany by children of Turkish immigrants and then tested in the United States, Brazil, Argentina and South Africa. They are now being made in Belgium, in an intriguing chain of international engagement that ends with Britain intervening at the last minute to garner praise for being the first to endorse the vaccine for use. “