EU tightens up on vaccine exports
New curbs keying on several factors seen to risk U.K. ill will
BERLIN — The European Commission introduced new limits on coronavirus vaccine exports Wednesday, a move that threatens to widen the rift between the European Union and its former member state Britain.
Though the revised rules do not constitute an outright ban, they will make reciprocity, a country’s epidemiological situation and its vaccination rate key criteria for export approval.
Expected to be in place for at least six weeks, the curbs could have a particularly strong impact on Britain, which has so far received more than 10 million doses from plants inside the EU — more than any other non-EU destination — but has exported no doses back to the bloc. Britain now has one of Europe’s lowest daily case numbers per capita and it has partially vaccinated more than 40% of its population, compared with just 9% in Germany and France.
As it lags behind both Britain and the United States in its vaccination campaign, the EU has seen growing anger from its citizens and a resurgence of the virus that has forced new lockdowns. Officials lay much of the blame with British-Swedish vaccine manufacturer AstraZeneca for failing to meet its production targets.
The path out of the pandemic also is being viewed as a critical post-Brexit test, pitting the 27-nation bloc’s communal approach against its former member’s go-it-alone model.
Britain’s departure meant it could negotiate its own vaccine deals without having to worry about unity or equity. It didn’t spend as long as the EU did negotiating prices or sorting through liability questions.
EU officials have defended their approach, saying that the bloc ensured that member countries weren’t competing with one another and poorer countries in the bloc weren’t left behind.
Officials also have cited the bloc’s commitment to supply other countries with doses produced within its territory, while Britain and the United States have not. Whereas more than 64 million doses had been distributed across EU member states and associated countries by the middle of this month, at least 41 million were exported outside the EU.
“But open roads should run in both directions,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was quoted as saying in a release Wednesday.
During a parliamentary committee session Wednesday, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was asked if he’d rule out retaliating against the EU.
“Vaccines are the product of international cooperation,” he said, adding, “I don’t think that blockades of either vaccines or of medicines or ingredients for vaccines are sensible.”
Afterward, the British government and European Commission issued a joint statement, saying: “We are all facing the same pandemic and the third wave makes cooperation between the EU and U.K. even more important.”
Meanwhile, Italian Premier Mario Draghi on Wednesday decried that various interest groups are getting their members covid-19 vaccines before people older than 80 receive the shots.
In a speech to Italy’s Senate, Draghi complained that not all the nation’s regions are following the Health Ministry’s directives that gives vaccine priority to older age groups.
“Some [regions] are neglecting their elderly in favor of groups that proclaim priority, probably on the basis of some contractual influence,” Draghi said. “We must be united in emerging form the pandemic, just as we have suffered it together in the preceding months.”
Italy’s regions largely wield autonomy in how health care is delivered to their residents. Many have designated categories of workers or professional associations to get priority in signing up for shots.
Older citizens and their children have taken to complaining, some by calling in to radio shows, about people in their late 80s and 90s who haven’t been able to get vaccinated while, say, university professors whose classrooms are unlikely to open anytime soon during restrictions have received jabs.
In Italy, 23% of the population is 65 or older, making it the world’s second-oldest country. By Wednesday, roughly 2.5 million of the nation’s 4.3 million residents older than 80 had received at least one shot of a covid-19 vaccine.
Draghi took to task the uneven quality of Italy’s vaccine rollout. “As far as vaccine coverage goes for those older than 80, unfortunately there persists major regional differences that are very difficult to accept, the premier said.
The ISPI political research think tank has calculated that the mortality rate in Italy would have dropped by nearly 40% in the first months of the year had the vaccination campaign concentrated on the over-80 population. Instead it dropped by just 10% as Italy, with Europe’s second-highest death toll in the pandemic, has reported a few hundred virus-related deaths every day for weeks now.
Private La7 TV and Italian daily Corriere della Sera, on the basis of that research, concluded that concentrating the vaccinations on the over-80 bracket could have saved 1,700 lives instead of 600.