Send surplus jabs to Ireland, Boris urged
BORIS JOHNSON is facing mounting calls to send surplus British Covid vaccines to Ireland.
The North’s first minister Arlene Foster suggested yesterday that ‘we can help our neighbours in the Republic’ to escape the EU vaccine shortage by offering us spare supplies of the British AstraZeneca jab.
But Mrs Foster appeared to make the offer conditional on the Government agreeing that the post-Brexit settlement for the North was ‘unworkable’. She said that she ‘absolutely’ thought the UK could help, saying: ‘Because of [Ireland’s] membership of the EU, they have not been able to access the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine in the way that, I am sure, they would have liked to if they had been a sovereign country.’
Several Conservative MPs are also calling for the British government to help Ireland but are not insisting on any preconditions to that help.
British government sources cautioned, however, that that would not be until May as supplies in the UK were still ‘very tight’.
At a vaccination rate of 3%, Ireland has fared better than many other EU countries.
But it still lags way behind the North’s 10.4% rate and the overall figure for the UK of nearly 12%.
Ireland has ordered 3.3 million of the AstraZeneca jab but now faces delays to delivery after the pharmaceutical giant warned the EU that initial supplies would be lower than anticipated.
In an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme yesterday, Mrs Foster played down suggestions of growing support for a united Ireland, and said that the response to Covid-19 had shown the ‘strength of the UK’.
She said: ‘We have more people vaccinated in Northern Ireland than anywhere else in the UK per head of population and we’re very proud of that.’ But the First Minister tore into Brussels for using emergency powers in the Brexit agreement to stop Northern Ireland being used as a ‘back door’ for Covid vaccines being exported to the UK.
She slammed Friday’s threat to invoke Article 16 powers – hastily withdrawn by Brussels amid widespread condemnation – as an ‘act of hostility’ and claimed the EU had acted out of ‘embarrassment and mismanagement’ over its own struggling vaccine rollout.