The EU has botched its vaccination programme

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Matthew Lynn has narrated this article for you to listen to.

It was the most excruciating moment of Ursula von der Leyen’s short tenure as President of the European Commission. On Friday morning she hastily put together a press conference to counter the growing media storm across Europe over the EU’s handling of vaccine procurement. She doubled down on ‘solidarity’, announcing that the Commission had managed to secure more doses of the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine, but also that the EU would stick absolutely to buying together. ‘We have all agreed, legally binding, that there will be no parallel negotiations, no parallel contracts,’ she insisted testily. ‘We’re all working together.’ At the same moment, however, her former colleagues in Berlin, where she was never popular, were busily undermining her. Germany, it turned out, had secured an extra 30 million doses directly from the manufacturer. Vaccine nationalism, it turned out, was bad for everyone except Germany.