Merkel’s government faces civil war over vaccine failures

European health ministries have not been happy places of late. Earlier this week, the German daily Bild reported a spat between national governments and the EU, frustrated at the bloc’s failure to procure vaccine doses in any serious numbers. That failure has now ricocheted back from Brussels, destabilising Germany’s increasingly fragile coalition government. So infuriated are Angela Merkel’s junior partners that they are now calling for a parliamentary inquiry into Germany’s vaccine failures, centring on one of her possible successors.

Problems began when health ministers in Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands (the four countries with the most advanced pharmaceutical industries in the EU) joined forces to try to get their order books filled. However, it seems Merkel herself intervened, passing that responsibility on to the Commission, which promptly dropped the ball. The EU, population 450 million, will now only have 200 million Pfizer doses and 80 million Moderna jabs by Autumn at the earliest.