Valdis Dombrovskis could probably do without his moment in the limelight. His spell as prime minister of Latvia, a country with a population of 1.9 million, was largely successful, at least until the collapse of a supermarket roof in 2014 brought his coalition to an early end.
Shunted off to Brussels, he worked quietly as commission vice-president for the euro and social dialogue
– nope, I don’t know what the heck that means either – before being promoted to the slightly more important trade portfolio last year. Now it turns out he is responsible for what is rapidly turning into the biggest policy catastrophe in Europe since the Second World War, at least according to his boss.
With every day that passes, the EU’s vaccines catastrophe gets worse and worse. The continent still lags woefully behind the accelerating programmes in the UK, the United States and Israel. Even tiny states on the borders of the EU, such as Serbia, helped by generous supplies from China, are racing ahead of the EU.
Valneva, the French firm with the latest promising vaccine, had to explain yesterday that the UK had ordered plenty of supplies, while the EU had yet to even sign a letter of intent.
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