Vaccine

Thursday

James Forsyth

This is just the start of the Brussels-Britain bust-ups

This is a crucial year for the UK’s two most important relationships, I say in the magazine this week. If the Johnson/Biden diplomatic relationship has got off to a better start than expected, the same cannot be said of the post-Brexit UK/EU one. The alignment between Johnson and Biden on climate change, Russia and China is helping the alliance. This relationship should become closer still given the two side’s agreement on China, the most important geo-political issue of the decade. The EU will attempt, often in not particularly edifying ways, to assert itself as the bigger partner. Earlier this month, Kurt Campbell — who will hold the pen on Asia

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Germany has just undermined the EU’s vaccine argument

Germany’s vaccine committee has advised the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine only be given to under-65s. The announcement marks a major twist in a week of muddled vaccine reports. On Tuesday, the German newspaper Handelsblatt suggested that German officials believed the Oxford vaccine was only 8 per cent effective for the over-65 groups (no evidence has been produced to support the 8 per cent claim). It has been heavily and extensively rebuffed by both AstraZeneca and the German government. Yet the German reporter who broke the story doubled down on the claims, raising the stakes as to whether he was making precarious reporting worse, or whether the European Medicines Agency may indeed conclude that the vaccine’s efficacy is too low. As

Steerpike Steerpike

BBC shows its pro-EU bias

It’s pretty clear that the EU has not exactly behaved well in recent weeks, during its row with AstraZeneca over the Oxford vaccine. First the German press pushed out an unsubstantiated claim that the vaccine had extremely low efficacy rates among the elderly. Then the EU threatened to introduce an export ban to prevent other countries receiving their doses. And now the EU is pushing AstraZeneca to divert supplies intended for the UK to Europe – to make up for the fact that the bloc dithered for three months before striking its own deal with the company. Meanwhile the UK, so far at least, has pretty much kept out of

Steven Barrett

The vaccine row shows the EU doesn’t understand contract law

The EU rejects ‘the logic of first-come first-serve,’ said the EU’s health commissioner Stella Kyriakides. ‘That may work at the neighbourhood butcher’s but not in contracts, and not in our advanced purchase agreements’. Contract law is an area of law I know well. And it is not a political comment to say the commissioner is wrong. We don’t know precisely what the contract between AstraZeneca and EU member states says. But the EU did publish another vaccine supply contract here. All this makes it very difficult to see what case the EU has In any would-be-case involving this contract, the EU has two massive hurdles to jump. Firstly, contractors undertake to

Constantin Eckner

The EU goes to war over the vaccine

German politics is backing Brussels in the ongoing dispute between the EU and AstraZeneca over Covid vaccine shipments. The European Union alleges that the pharma firm, which is producing the Oxford-developed vaccine, is planning to supply the UK faster and while failing to fulfil its contract with Brussels. A meeting on Wednesday between officials and representatives from the Cambridge-based company was described as ‘constructive’ but no solution was found. Meanwhile, Martin Schulz, the former president of the European Parliament and prominent German Social Democrat, called for hard action against AstraZeneca. ‘This company is heavily dominated by the Brits and has apparently clear priorities as to which countries it supplies,’ he said. ‘If that is

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Vaccine battles, illegal haircuts and Biden’s chat with Boris

Home Supplies of the Pfizer vaccine (made in Belgium) were feared to be at risk from a declaration by the European Union health commissioner, Stella Kyriakides, that EU companies would have to ‘provide early notification whenever they want to export vaccines to third countries’. This came after AstraZeneca was said to be able to deliver by the end of March only 31 million of 80 million doses ordered by the EU. The company, with a factory in England, had undertaken to deliver two million doses a week to the UK. Nadhim Zahawi, the minister for vaccination, said that supplies were ‘tight’ but the mid-February target of 15 million vaccinations would

The Spectator

Are we returning to ‘normalcy’ or ‘normality’?

New normal Why have so many people started saying ‘normalcy’ rather than ‘normality’? — Normalcy has been traced back to 1857 when it was used in geometry to denote a state where lines were perpendicular to each other. It was rarely used outside mathematics until 1920, when the then US presidential candidate Warren Harding made a speech in Boston referring to a ‘return to normalcy’ following the Great War. He said: ‘America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy.’ He was ridiculed for what was regarded by many as a malapropism. Although ‘normalcy’ is now in common use in the US, it was still the lesser-used

Matthew Lynn

Vaccine wars: the global battle for a precious resource

Armed guards are patrolling the perimeter fence of a sleek factory. Software experts are fending off hackers. Border officials are checking trucks and ferries, not for weapons or illegal immigrants, but for a mysterious biochemical soup, while spies and spin doctors are feeding social media with scare stories flaming one national champion or another. Welcome to the first great geopolitical battle of the 21st century. It may sound like something ripped from the pages of a dystopian sci-fi novel, but in truth we’re seeing the opening salvos in the vaccine wars. Rather than co-operating with one another to roll out a global vaccination campaign to rid the world of Covid-19,

Wednesday

James Forsyth

How the EU vaccine row could escalate

The EU is now insisting that AstraZeneca use vaccine produced at its UK site to make up for a shortfall in its supplies to the EU. This is likely to kick off a major row as the UK went to great trouble to ensure that it had first refusal on all the Oxford vaccine produced in the UK. Indeed, AstraZeneca’s willingness to accept that condition is a major reason why Oxford ended up partnering with them. It is not hard to see how this situation could escalate. The EU is already saying that companies should notify them before exporting vaccine out of the bloc, and the German government is going further, calling for

Joanna Rossiter Joanna Rossiter

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.

Tuesday

Constantin Eckner

Merkel is making a mess of Germany’s Covid vaccine rollout

Angela Merkel is known for her competency, yet even Mutti’s defenders would struggle to use that word to describe Germany’s rollout of the Covid-19 vaccine. German firm BioNTech won the race to develop a vaccine, but this has not prevented crippling supply shortages, which has forced states including North Rhine-Westphalia, in the west of the country, to suspend jabs.  German health minister Jens Spahn has come under fire and his insistence that ‘the vaccine is a scarce product worldwide’ rings hollow when Germans look at the speed of the vaccine rollout in Britain. Now, to make matters worse, German’s health ministry has found itself caught in a fresh row: over the effectiveness of the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine. German newspaper Handelsblatt reported

Robert Peston Robert Peston

Is the EU to blame for AstraZeneca’s vaccine shortage?

The important difference between AstraZeneca’s relationship with the UK and its relationship with the EU – and the reason it has fallen behind schedule on around 50m vaccine doses promised to the bloc – is that the UK agreed its deal with AstraZeneca a full three months before the EU did. This gave AstraZeneca an extra three months to sort out manufacturing and supply problems relating to the UK contract (there were plenty of problems). Here is the important timeline. In May AstraZeneca reached an agreement with Oxford and the UK government to make and supply the vaccine. In fact, Oxford had already started work on the supply chain. The

Steerpike Steerpike

German paper’s excruciating Oxford vaccine muddle

The Düsseldorf offices of German daily newspaper Handelsblatt will not be a happy place this morning. Last night, the respected financial paper published a 1,200 word piece claiming that the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine is only 8 per cent effective among the over-65s. The claim, based on anonymous sources within the German government, caused outrage.  AstraZeneca responded quickly, saying the allegations were ‘completely incorrect’ while a spokesperson for Oxford University said there was ‘no basis for the claims of very low efficacy’, pointing to five peer-reviewed papers into the vaccine’s efficacy. Meanwhile, UK government ministers seethed over the report blasting its recklessness — which came after a day of escalating tensions with the EU over the

Monday

Katy Balls

Matt Hancock’s tests for lifting lockdown

As the government comes under pressure from Tory MPs to provide a timeline for pupils returning to school, the Health Secretary remained tight-lipped in the Monday government press conference on when lockdown will be eased. Asked whether any guidance could be offered on the issue, Matt Hancock cited the number of people admitted to hospital – twice as many as in the first peak – and on ventilators to show there is a long road ahead. The Health Secretary said that the majority of people understand why it is difficult to put a timeline on ending lockdown. He did though point to the factors that would decide when it could

Matthew Lynn

Matt Hancock is right: we are in a vaccine race with France

There are plenty of different ways in which Matt Hancock, the health secretary, can be criticised for his handling of the Covid-19 crisis. Track and trace didn’t work, lockdowns were sporadic and probably too late, and the messaging wobbled all over the place. But comparing the British vaccination drive to France and the rest of the EU? That was completely right. When Hancock remarked on Sky News yesterday that the UK had vaccinated more people in just three days than France had managed in total, his critics on social media went into a predictable meltdown. It’s not a competition or a race lectured the finger-waggers. We have only done one

Sunday

Matthew Lynn

The EU’s vaccine catastrophe is a crisis of its own making

As news emerges that both Pfizer and AstraZeneca are cutting supplies of their Covid-19 vaccines to the EU by up to 60 per cent, EU officials are turning on the drug companies, threatening fines and lawsuits if they don’t speed up deliveries. The Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte has blasted the delays as unacceptable and threatened to take the companies to court. While the European Council President Charles Michel is threatening to use ‘all the legal means at our disposal’ to make the drugs companies ‘respect the contracts’ signed with the EU. But hold on, because on closer inspection it turns out that much of the unfolding vaccine catastrophe in

Thursday

Uri Shalit

How effective has the Covid vaccine been in Israel?

The world’s eyes are on Israel at the moment, as the country continues its phenomenally fast roll-out of the Pfizer vaccine. As of yesterday, the country had vaccinated a third of its population with at least one dose, which means we are starting to find out vital information about the vaccine’s effectiveness and how it works in the real world. So what have he learned about the vaccine so far? First some statistics: as of yesterday, 78 per cent of people over the age of 60 in Israel will have received at least one dose of the Pfizer vaccine. 58 per cent of the over-60s are over 14 days from

Joan Collins

Vaccination is the only way out of this catastrophe

Monday started with me opening my bedroom windows to let what little light there is come through, only to find two workmen on my balcony looking surprised that anyone lived in the building. Since my shooing gestures weren’t understood, I had to step outside, putting myself inside the regulatory two metres, to tell them to ‘get off my land’. As they weren’t even wearing masks, I now am worried they could have been carrying Covid. My landlord is carrying out external redecorations. Is this truly ‘essential’ work? I asked. When so many are not allowed to work at all, and have to isolate at home, must I be subjected to

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The truth about the vaccine ‘postcode lottery’

‘Postcode lottery!’ people scream when one area feels less well treated than another in a public service — in this case, the rollout of the Covid vaccines. It is a silly phrase, if you believe in the devolution of power and the importance of locality. The point of local health trusts, councils and so on is to let local people run most of the things that matter to them. The logical result is that — even within a national set-up like the NHS — there will be differences. If there were no differences, it would not follow that everyone was getting the same high-quality service. It would much more likely

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Vaccination, inauguration and a food box denunciation

Home The government undertook to offer a first dose of vaccine to the adult population of the UK by September. More than four million had now been vaccinated. The campaign was on target to vaccinate 15 million by mid-February. A ten-day trial would see some hospitals open for vaccinations 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Racecourses, sports arenas and even cathedrals such as Salisbury, Lichfield and Blackburn became vaccination centres. St Paul’s Cathedral in London suspended public worship because of the danger of coronavirus, as did more than half of Church of England churches. At the beginning of the week, Sunday 17 January, total deaths (within 28 days