The EU is blaming everyone but itself for its vaccine debacle

Something has gone badly wrong with the EU’s rollout of the Covid vaccine. Yet in its response to this debacle, Brussels seems determined to double down, engaging in behaviour of the pettiest kind as it blames everyone but itself for what has happened.

‘The companies must deliver’, Ursula von der Leyen, the EU commission’s president said this week, as she announced the launch of a ‘vaccine export transparency mechanism’. In reality, this plan to oblige companies to notify the commission when vaccines leave the EU (into Britain, for example) is an attempt to pile pressure on the pharmaceutical firms who have given us the only way out of the situation we find ourselves in.

To coin a favourite phrase from Brexit, von der Leyen’s statement rather seems like having her cake and eating it. How can the EU on one hand claim it is acting altruistically for the ‘global common good’ and then announce that it is going to try and tie down those exporting perfectly legal, paid-for vaccines from the EU with unnecessary red tape? It was a masterclass in Potemkin rhetoric.