Sharing our success with the Covid vaccine will benefit all

SCHADENFREUDE is a German word. But the emotion it describes – pleasure derived from another’s misfortune – might be something some in Britain, including members of the Government, are tempted to indulge in right now.

As the European Union ties itself in knots over the coronavirus vaccination programme, while the UK powers ahead, the urge to smirk from a position of apparent superiority is a powerful one.

Yet we and our leaders should resist the temptation. Because while there is good reason to congratulate ourselves here in Britain for the speed and efficiency with which we are getting the population protected from Covid-19, the victory will be meaningless if our nearest neighbours find they are fighting a losing battle and the consequences of their third wave of disease begin to wash up on our shores.

Not only that but Britons need the nations of Europe to do well. We are military allies, trading partners and many here in the UK have friends and relatives across the Channel. Brexit may have removed us from the EU; it has not changed the close relationship many in Britain have with the nations of mainland Europe.

That said, there is a clear lesson from the way the EU has mishandled its own vaccination programme that will, for some, be justification enough for Brexit. The value of being able to undertake such a massive and crucial operation as providing life-saving vaccines for a whole population is, self-evidently, one better carried out by a nation and its government rather than a bloc of 27.

But having successfully done this, that nation – in this case Britain – needs to behave with magnanimity, not only for the sake of doing the right thing by its neighbours, but for selfish reasons too.

The first priority of any government is to protect its own citizens. The British government rightly targeted the purchase and administration of millions of doses of coronavirus vaccines at its own people first. But the next step must be to assist in whatever way possible, the roll-out of vaccines more widely.

In stepping back from the brink of banning exports of vaccines made in mainland Europe the EU has – thus far at least – shown some belated good sense on this issue. Britain, once it has caught up with its own programme at home, needs to reciprocate and offer what help it can to former partners on the continent.

It is not hard to see how a vaccine war could easily erupt. Weapons of conflict were once confined to bombs and bullets.

Today, however, all sorts of “assets” from information and data to medicines like the coronavirus vaccines can be used as aggressors in a war with other nations.

Yet the risks of adopting such tactics are massive and, in the end, the benefits to the nations behaving in such a way rapidly diminish. One of the reasons Covid-19 spread so rampantly is because we live in an interconnected world.

One of the ways we will escape the clutches of the virus is by sharing the means to protect all our peoples.

Britain’s success in the vaccination programme is good for Britain. It must be good for the world, too.