In the eyes of the EU, delaying our vaccines would be a mark of virtue

Brussels’s commitment to a soft-socialist idea of ‘fairness’ has left it desperate to penalise successful nations

The European Union has clearly decided to withdraw its threat of all out vaccine war with the UK. It is now dumping on the proxy enemy – AstraZeneca – instead. This is the perverse reward the company gets for its public spirited resolution to offer a life-saving vaccine to the world at cost, thereby relinquishing the incalculably enormous profits that might have been made – and, indeed, are being made by the less altruistic manufacturers of competing vaccines.

Having had its product’s efficacy, reliability and safety repeatedly trashed by European heads of state to the point where the stocks of its vaccine presently stored in the EU cannot be given away, AstraZeneca is now being accused of reneging on contractual commitments to supply ever more quantities that Europe has managed, completely unjustifiably, to discredit. This situation is now technically incomprehensible.

So hysterical have the attacks become on this defenceless company – which, as I have suggested, has become the rhetorical stand-in for the UK now so demonstrably, infuriatingly beating the EU in the vaccination race – that the attacks on it verge on the defamatory. One MEP suggested in an interview last week that the claim that AstraZeneca was not making profits on the sale of its vaccine was somehow doubtful. (“We would have to look at the books,” he said, with triumphant suspicion.)

Not that the UK Government itself is completely spared the vituperation. As I write there are still emanations of blustering gibberish directed at UK policy being fired across the Channel. Jean-Yves Le Drian, the French foreign minister, has said that the EU would “not be blackmailed” by the UK as a consequence of our decision to offer as many first doses as possible. So far as I can tell, this absurd remark refers to the possibility that we might claim to be running short of second jab vaccines to justify demanding more of the AstraZeneca product (which, until about 20 minutes ago, the EU regarded as inferior). Is that what he means? Your guess is as good as mine.

What on earth do these people think they are doing? Apart, of course, from trying to shift the blame from the hopeless mess they have made of their own vaccination programme which, by unfortunate contrast with their newly independent next door neighbour, could suggest that belonging to the EU and being party to its bloc mentality might not be such a great idea. That conclusion, as we know, would be an existential threat to the entire European project, which is why the principal architects of it – France and Germany, whose leaders usually manage to talk intelligible sense – are reduced to incoherence.

If the idea takes hold that the structures and decision-making processes of the EU are not just cumbersome or vaguely annoying but quite literally life-threatening, that the unity of the bloc matters more to its leaders than the survival of its citizens – well, there will be no coming back from that, will there?

In a superhuman and counter intuitive attempt at broad-mindedness I will attempt to give some plausible account of what might be the EU’s thinking. First, there is the rather unsavoury commercial angle: AstraZeneca’s vaccine development was funded directly by the British Government, which is why it was both possible and ethically appropriate for it to be distributed on a non-profit basis. But in creating a publicly funded competitor to the private pharmaceutical companies, the UK distorted the market: the new entrant could make a cheaper product that undercut the existing manufacturers, which are now almost certainly bringing pressure on foreign governments, in the US as well as Europe, to push out the interloper.

This is in paradoxical contrast to the larger, more idealistic rationale the EU officially espouses, the key to which lies in those recent additions to its list of favoured abstract nouns. Everybody is now uttering the words “reciprocity” and “proportionality” as if they were an instant moral formula (like the old favourite “solidarity”), which can silence any argument.

What they appear to amount to is the basic soft-socialist concept of fairness – which is to say, everybody must have everything that everybody else has at exactly the same time. This is the traditional basis for wealth redistribution and equality of outcome. Nobody must have any more advantages in terms of wealth, education, health or whatever, even if they have made a greater effort or been of more virtuous character. (Because having the resources to make more of an effort or be more virtuous is itself an unfair advantage.) So it is inherently unfair for the UK to benefit from the fact that it made better and faster decisions about its vaccine programme, including choosing to subsidise its own vaccine development company.

What this amounts to in practice is that no state (EU member or not) should be able to get ahead of any other, whatever the quality of its own decisions and competence of its management. EU spokesmen said quite explicitly when this vindictive row began that the UK rollout should actually be held up until EU countries caught up – even, presumably, if this were to cost lives. Britain should be penalised or handicapped, in other words, for being too successful at preventing serious illness and deaths among its own population. I find the idea that such a notion should be contemplated – let alone shamelessly pronounced as a public statement – pretty staggering.

So, rather oddly, the EU finds itself attacking a state-subsidised vaccine manufacturer that is declining to make a profit, preferring instead to advance the interests of private, profit-harvesting capitalist outfits, while with its official philosophical hat on making the case for absolute socialist equality and universally shared benefit. There is something about those shibboleths of “reciprocity” and “proportionality” (and “solidarity” too) that is oddly reminiscent of the unreformed medieval Church trying to fight off the Protestant notions of individual initiative and rewarding of competitiveness. And yet the venture that most obviously embodies those social virtues is attacked.

Very confusing.

What on earth do these people think they are doing? Apart, of course, from trying to shift the blame from the hopeless mess they have made of their own vaccination programme