EU wrong to spark a war of the doses
WATCHING EU bosses this week it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that they’ve all gone stark raving mad. The intimidation, the bullying, the threats to Britain and the AstraZeneca bosses have verged on the psychotic. They’re demanding we hand over our vaccine supplies and they imposed an export ban to stop millions of jabs from the Continent getting to us. They raided AZ’s Belgium plant to see if they were lying about production problems and insisted they diverted our vaccines to them. They’re even threatening to invoke emergency powers under Article 122 of the Lisbon Treaty which would allow them to seize control of AZ’s production process. Oh, and Germany has publicly rubbished the Oxford vaccine (which it’s still busting a gut to get), claiming it doesn’t work in the over 65s when scientists everywhere say it does.
So why all this hysteria? Well, it’s because the EU has cocked up – big style. While it dithered, not just in ordering vaccines but approving them for use, Britain was moving at breakneck speed to acquire millions of jabs for its citizens. And it did, which is why our order went in THREE whole months before the EU’s.
The consequence of that means the EU is now 75 million doses short and people will undoubtedly die as a result of its incompetence. But instead of accepting responsibility for that it’s trying to cover its backside by haranguing the UK and demanding OUR vaccines – which would be funny if it wasn’t so damned ironic. After years of bullying, spite and dirty tricks in Brexit negotiations – not to mention the jeers about our competency as a country – EU bosses now want “lil’ ol’ Britain” to bail them out and hand over vaccines bought to save British lives. This is the bloc that insisted its sheer size meant it could look after its 27 member states – only now it’s become clear it can’t.
I looked up the definition of insanity and it says: “irrational, paranoid, nuts, preposterous”. And yes, every one of those words applies to those EU loons who’ve been threatening us for no other reason than this Government moved fast to protect its citizens and they did not.
“We reject the logic that it’s first come, first served,” raged European health commissioner Stella Kyriakides. Well she can reject it all she likes but that’s how commercial contracts work.
Thankfully AstraZeneca, which is suffering hideous threats from the EU about having its investment pulled if it doesn’t do what it’s told, has now published its contract with the bloc which proves Brussels lied when it said AZ had to hand over its doses to them.
So let them continue to threaten and scream at us, let them try to say everything that’s happening to EU citizens is OUR fault, but the world is watching – and it knows it isn’t. In Germany the media (which screamed that the EU’s incompetence was the “best ever advert for Brexit”) have already accused Merkel of sacrificing German lives by handing over responsibility for vaccine orders to the bloc. That’s because months ago Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands all had preliminary deals for them but EU bosses insisted they should be the ones to conduct negotiations. And now look where they are. Britain has inoculated 11.7 per cent of its population, Germany just 2.6 per cent and France, a pathetic 1.8 per cent.
Everyone who previously was contemptuous of the EU must look at it now – screaming, raging, flailing and blaming everyone else for its mistakes – and see their contempt was justified.
Britain has blundered many times during this pandemic but the vaccine rollout has been magnificent. Even better, we’re getting 60 million doses of the US’s wonder jab, Novavax, and it’s being produced in Teesside so the EU can’t get its hands on it. And none of this would have happened if we were still in the EU.
Just think about that…