BRUSSELS: In a meeting last week in the Europa building in Brussels, home of the European Union’s political leadership, diplomats for the 27 member states were desperate.
The EU had paid billions of euros toward shots to curb a pandemic that was killing thousands of Europeans every day. Now vaccine-makers had cut back deliveries, and the EU was trapped in a public fight.
“This is a catastrophe,” French ambassador Philippe Leglise-Costa told the Jan. 27 meeting, according to a diplomatic note seen by Sources.
It was a crucial moment in nearly two weeks of confusion and anger over the EU’s vaccine supply, which were to plunge the bloc into its deepest crisis since Ursula von der Leyen took over the executive European Commission just over a year ago.
A week earlier, the EU had set a target to vaccinate 70% of adults against COVID-19 by the end of summer, a potential ticket out of lockdowns that have cost countries billions. As the impact of the vaccine shortfall became clear, the bloc embarked on a campaign to shame drug0-makers hit by production delays into releasing more supply.
But the tactic wasn’t working and details of confidential deals were leaking out, casting doubt on the EU’s ability to enforce contracts it had agreed on behalf of its members.
Reuters has obtained exclusive details of internal EU talks over the past month in diplomatic notes, and interviewed four people present at key meetings to verify them. The notes reveal how the EU’s top executives lurched from satisfaction about the vaccination programme to panic.
Some EU officials were already aware in December of delays in vaccine production, the notes show, but the Commission announced ambitious targets nonetheless. The EU initially kept no track of companies’ vaccine doses leaving the bloc, only realizing after its own supplies were delayed it could not trace the millions of doses that had already been exported. And as its attempts to win ground by legal means failed, the Commission faced sharp attacks from EU governments on its public communication strategy.
In a pandemic that has killed over 700,000 people in Europe alone, the delays announced by the companies producing coronavirus vaccines – AstraZeneca PLC and Pfizer Inc. – risked leaving millions in Europe unprotected deep in the winter, just as new, more transmissible, variants were circulating and hospitals were being overwhelmed. Vaccination centres from Madrid to Paris had closed for lack of supply.
The EU Commission declined comment for this story. So did AstraZeneca, which has said it is focused on boosting supplies to the bloc after the manufacturing glitches. The Commission has often said it expects an exponential increase in the availability of vaccines from April. Pfizer’s Chief Executive Albert Bourla told Reuters production is back on track in Europe after the company made changes at its Belgian manufacturing site to increase supply.
The vaccine squeeze was not just a public health nightmare. It was also a political crisis.
Britain, freshly divorced from the EU’s single market after five years of bitter negotiations, was inoculating people at a much faster pace than any EU country, public data show.
Diplomats feared the Commission was losing the battle against a “narrative of … big failure,” a senior EU diplomat who was present at the Jan. 27 meeting told Reuters. They urged the Commission to cool a row with British company AstraZeneca for the sake of getting drugs as soon as possible, the notes show and people present said.
The Commission’s dilemma underscores the power of big drugmakers as governments scramble to vaccinate their citizens, and the geopolitical tensions that can result.
Eventually, the notes show EU diplomats recognised the bloc may not benefit from arguing about contracts with AstraZeneca. Instead, the Commission turned up the heat on the United Kingdom – which AstraZeneca said was preventing British-made vaccines from reaching Europe – only to swiftly step back after realising it risked disrupting a border agreement in the Brexit accord which London and Dublin said could have serious consequences for security in Northern Ireland.
The damage to the EU’s image was visible on the front pages of Britain’s eurosceptic popular press, with headlines declaring “EU vaccines war explodes” and “EU chiefs behaving like the mafia.”
A spokesman for the French ambassador said he had urged the EU “to communicate in an orderly and strategic manner.”
A British government spokesperson said, “We are in constant contact with the vaccine manufacturers and remain confident that the supply of vaccine to the UK will not be disrupted.” The UK government declined to comment on AstraZeneca’s claim it was preventing vaccines from reaching Europe, but said it does not prohibit any export of COVID-19 vaccines.
