Vaccine

Friday

Steerpike

Von der Leyen gets that sinking feeling

HMS Britain seems to be a nippier beast after her Brexit refit. That is, at least, according to EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.  Earlier today the embattled Eurocrat admitted that when it comes to Covid vaccine procurement, the European bloc is a ‘tanker’ by comparison to the UK’s ‘speedboat’. When asked about her ability to get hold of life-saving jabs, she told reporters:  I’m aware that a country might be a speedboat and the EU more a tanker. If we conclude a contract, we need another five days for the member states to say, ‘yes’ — and these are five days, five working days.So, obviously, of course a decision taken

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

The French lesson that shames Britain

Emmanuel Macron has become the pantomime villain for much of the British press after his hissy fit last week in which he questioned the efficacy of the AstraZeneca jab. It was the latest in a series of snipes at the British that has made the French president the scourge of Fleet Street. ‘Bargain-basement Bonaparte,’ was how the Daily Mail described Macron, while the Sun plumped for ‘pint-sized egomaniac’. He’s none too popular among his own people, either, the figurehead of the French failure to be the only member of the UN Security Council incapable of producing their own vaccine. No wonder a recent opinion poll suggested Marine Le Pen is a stronger

Thursday

Trevor Phillips

Minority groups should ignore the anti-vax charlatans

My great-great-grandmother, born on a Barbadian plantation and transported to what was British Guiana in the 19th century, gave rise to a tribe that has spread across the globe. Weirdly, Covid has brought us together (via Zoom) in a way that used to be reserved for weddings and funerals. My New Yorker nephew found a time of day that could accommodate the Californians, the Canadians and the English rump in London, Cambridge and Nottingham. Harlem’s lights glimmered from another nephew’s screen, while the Florida gang kept their windows shut just in case the neighbours not so far away in Mar-a-Lago decided to drop by. Sadly, someone forgot to let the

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Secrets of the Vaccine Taskforce’s success

Until a few weeks ago, the government’s track record on Covid was one of repeated failure. The death toll, the depth of the recession, the public disapproval of the government: Britain’s figures were among the worst in the world. But with vaccines, things have changed. The UK is now on track to be the first major country in the world to vaccinate its way out of lockdown. The foreign press coverage has turned from mockery to awe, with Britain having vaccinated more people than France, Germany, Italy and Spain put together. Many of those behind this success are virtually unknown to the public. Their story matters, because the Vaccine Taskforce

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Vaccine success is a boost for Boris – and the Union

Imagine for a minute what British politics would be like without a Covid vaccine. The cabinet would be deeply, and possibly irrevocably, split between those who favoured another year of lockdown on public health grounds and those who thought that the country had no alternative in the circumstances but to ease restrictions and learn to live with the virus. The 100,000 death toll would have been reached with no hope in sight and a public sense that, almost inevitably, things were going to get worse. The vaccine has changed so much. It has given people hope. There is a belief in the general public that this will be the last

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Could lockdown lift sooner?

Wednesday’s very upbeat Downing Street coronavirus briefing underlined the optimism that Boris Johnson feels about the way the Covid crisis could work out for him. The Prime Minister was celebrating the UK passing the ten million mark for the number of people who have received their first dose of the vaccine, and thanked the NHS for the programme, which he described as ‘the most colossal in the history of our National Health Service’. He also very pointedly thanked the Vaccine Taskforce, which the Prime Minister sees as another vindication of his approach to the pandemic. For Johnson, the first part of the coronavirus crisis was bruising and the government made

Matthew Lynn Matthew Lynn

The vaccine disaster has fatally undermined the EU

It might be a bit late, but the supply will come on tap eventually. France’s Sanofi has partnered with Pfizer to start manufacturing its vaccine. BioNTech has just bought a factory in Marburg, Germany from Switzerland’s drugs giant Novartis to retrofit into a vaccine plant. With plenty of money being splashed around, production will arrive soon. Making vaccines is tricky, but not that tricky. By the summer, Europe should have enough Covid-19 shots to jab everyone who wants one. Crisis over, right? Ursula von der Leyen can get back to setting diversity targets, or making climate pledges, or whatever it was she was up to before people started asking why

Tuesday

Ross Clark

New Oxford data supports UK vaccine strategy

Ever since the Oxford-AstraZeneca team announced the results of its Phase 3 trials last November, there has been a suspicion among some that their vaccine is the poor relation of the messenger RNA vaccines developed by Pfizer and Moderna. It might be cheap compared with the others, it might be easy to store and transport, but the results published last November indicated that it had an efficacy of 70 per cent compared with over 90 per cent for Pfizer and Moderna. Even that was questioned when it was pointed out that the 70 per cent figure was arrived at by mixing different trials, involving different quantities of vaccine. When a

William Nattrass William Nattrass

Central Europe’s vaccine scepticism problem

Countries around the world are in a race against time to vaccinate their populations against Covid-19. But there is one particular region which appears to have a growing problem with vaccine scepticism: Central and Eastern Europe. As a British expat living in the Czech Republic, I have noticed the lack of eagerness with which many Czechs discuss the vaccine rollout. This may in part be due to the country’s floundering and much-criticised vaccination programme. But it is noticeable that anti-vaccine sentiment is more common – and gets much more attention – here than in the UK. Ex-President Václav Klaus recently told a large anti-lockdown rally in Prague that vaccines are

Matthew Lynn Matthew Lynn

Ursula von der Leyen has broken the first rule of leadership

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,

Monday

Joanna Rossiter

Why vaccine nationalism won’t end in 2021

After the EU’s behaviour last week, no one can be under any illusion about how nationalistic the pandemic has now become. Even before the EU attempted to halt vaccine supplies destined for Britain, the scrabble to secure enough doses had become reminiscent of the cold war. It wasn’t for nothing that the Russians named their vaccine ‘Sputnik’ – a reference to the satellite they launched in 1957 during the space race. Nor was it by chance that the Scottish government appeared to find it so difficult to say the word ‘Oxford’ when talking about the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine. But these sorts of political tiffs are just the beginning. Now that vaccinations

Steerpike Steerpike

NYT’s rare praise for Brexit Britain

Hold on to your hats. In recent years, the New York Times has rarely if ever missed an opportunity to bash Brexit Britain. Whether it’s spreading false claims over ‘mix and match vaccines’, identifying Britons as mutton-munchers or simply linking the UK’s decision to leave the EU with bad Covid etiquette.  So Mr S must admit he nearly choked on his cornflakes on seeing the latest front page of America’s self-styled paper of record. Not only was the subject the UK, but the report was a positive one – with the headline: ‘In vaccines, UK has a pandemic win at last’.  While the report still managed to find apparent downsides to a fast vaccination programme

Steerpike Steerpike

Martin Selmayr’s EU vaccine boast backfires

In the aftermath of the EU’s vaccine bungle, Brussels remains in damage limitation mode, determined to ensure that someone else gets the blame for its own crisis. But Mr S wonders whether top EU diplomat Martin Selmayr’s bid to put a positive spin on what has unfolded over the last few days was really so wise. Selmayr, who revelled in his nickname ‘the Rasputin of Brussels’ during his time serving as Jean-Claude Juncker’s aide, attempted to make a comparison between Europe’s vaccine rollout rate and that of Africa, the poorest continent on Earth. Selmayr, who now serves as the EU Commission representative in Austria, wrote: ‘The EU, thanks to the joint work of 27 governments,

Saturday

Brendan O’Neill

It’s time for Ireland to stand up to the EU

Ireland’s political class is facing a moment of truth. Following yesterday’s extraordinary events — with the EU temporarily triggering Article 16 of the Northern Ireland Protocol as part of its desperate effort to manage its self-made vaccines crisis — the Dublin elites have some serious soul-searching to do. They must now ask themselves if they are willing to be members of this institution that has just treated them with such contempt; which has just signalled in front of the entire world that it does not take Irish sovereignty or Irish democracy very seriously at all. Contempt is not too strong a word for what the EU has just done to

Jim Lawley

Can Spain’s faith in the EU survive Covid?

According to ancient Moorish legend, when the world was created each land was given five wishes. Spain’s first four wishes – for clear skies, seas full of fish, good fruit, and beautiful women – were all granted, but the fifth, for good government, was denied on the grounds that to grant that too would create a paradise on earth. Certainly over the last couple of centuries, good government in Spain has tended to be conspicuous by its absence. Philosopher Ortega y Gasset summed up Spain’s tragic history and its desire to become more like the liberal democratic European countries in his famous phrase: ‘Spain is the problem and Europe the

Friday

Robert Peston

The EU is playing a dangerous game with vaccine exports

The EU is arguably playing a self-harming game in potentially restricting vaccine exports to the UK as a tit for tat for the inability of AstraZeneca to supply the 80 million doses it ordered by the end of March. First of all, this looks like unedifying EU sour grapes that the UK, out of the EU, moved earlier to place vaccine contracts and will soon be self-sufficient in vaccines. Second, it risks damaging the reputation of the EU as a place where multinationals can securely invest, because it is blowing up the supply chains of two big American companies with EU operations, Pfizer and Moderna. The UK, desperate for inward

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

The Johnson & Johnson jab is a game changer

Good vaccine news has been pouring in today — this afternoon it was the turn of the Janssen vaccine, made by US company Johnson & Johnson. An international trial, in which the vaccine was tested against various strains of the virus, has found the jab to have 66 per cent overall efficacy. This is a lower efficacy rate than the trial conducted in the United States — which found the jab to be 72 per cent effective. But the international trial was designed to test the vaccine against more aggressive strains of the virus in a bid to answer questions about the new mutations. The trail set up sites in ‘red list’

Steven Barrett

Can the EU win a case against AstraZeneca? I’m not convinced

The contract between AstraZeneca and the EU has now been published. It confirms my view, expressed on Coffee House, that the EU does not – despite its claims – have any form of ‘strong case’ or way to jump a queue to speed up its vaccine rollout. Both contracts (the one, published previously, which I used as an example in my last post, and today’s) are what the EU calls advance purchase agreements, or APAs. The latest contract has slightly different wording in some places. But the differences are not substantial. This, then, appears to be bad news for the EU if it is serious about taking action against AstraZeneca.

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Britain gets a boost to its vaccine programme

As the blame game gets underway in Brussels over the EU’s sluggish vaccination programme, the UK government has fresh reason for cheer: a new coronavirus jab. The Novavax vaccine has successfully completed its phase three trials — finding it to be 89 per cent effective in large-scale UK trials. This data will now be passed to the MHRA to assess whether the vaccine can be approved for UK use. While the vaccine is thought to be highly effective against the Kent strain of Covid, it is less effective against the South African variant. While it still offers some protection, Novavax is following Moderna’s lead in developing a booster shot to tackle this. The

Nick Tyrone Nick Tyrone

The EU vaccine debacle poses a dilemma for Remainers like me

There is no question about it, at least if you want to evaluate things objectively: the UK has handled Covid vaccine rollout well (at least so far) and the EU has dealt with it badly. For a Remainer like me, this raises a difficult question: does this prove that Brexit was a good idea after all? Compared to the EU27, the UK has been able to act nimbly in vaccine negotiations. While Brussels has been held up by various delays and supply issues, these have not affected the UK. This is thanks in large part to the fact that its contract with AstraZeneca was signed three months before the EU