Joe Biden to attend EU virtual vaccine summit this week
A virtual summit of EU leaders, where the issue of vaccine bans is top of the agenda, has been hailed as a moment to “rebuild” the transatlantic alliance as Joe Biden confirmed he would attend.
Charles Michel, the former Belgian prime minister who now chairs EU summits as European council president, said he had asked Biden to join the Thursday evening videoconference “for him to share his views on our future cooperation”. “Time to rebuild our transatlantic alliance,” he tweeted.
A key issue to be discussed by the 27 EU heads of state and government is the supply and distribution of vaccines. The lack of vaccine doses being exported from the UK to the EU, compared with the 10m that have gone the other way, will be a point of discussion. EU leaders are looking at how they might force “reciprocity” on vaccine supply.
But the US’s export policy is now also likely to be a talking point given the president’s attendance, with officials in Brussels recently speaking of their hopes for a change in tack from the new administration.
On coming to office, Biden signed an executive order upholding the ban on exporting vaccines enforced by Donald Trump. But the EU has been privately lobbying the White House to permit the export of millions of doses of the Oxford/AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine to Europe.
The US has yet to give the vaccine approval, leaving millions of doses unused in warehouses. Earlier this month Michel unfavourably compared the “outright export bans” of the US and the UK with the EU’s record in allowing doses to be shipped around the world from the bloc. Those comments drew a denial from Boris Johnson in the House of Commons.
Biden is due to attend the meeting at 7.45pm GMT. He is also expected to come to Brussels for a physical meeting later in the year on Michel’s invitation.
It will be the first time a US president has met all the EU heads of state and government at a meeting since Barack Obama joined a summit in Prague in 2009.
Trump met the EU’s then institutional leaders, Donald Tusk and JeanClaude Juncker, presidents of the European council and commission during his time in the White House, but he did not attend a formal meeting of the 27 leaders of the member states.