‘EU must acknowledge British taxpayer funding of Oxford jab’
BRITAIN will tell the EU this week they must take into account the millions spent by British taxpayers on creating the AstraZeneca vaccine, as the threat of blocking its export remains.
Talks resume as early as tomorrow to break a stand-off over jabs manufactured at the company’s Halix plant in Leiden, the Netherlands.
The European Commission has threatened to block shipment of vaccines from Halix to the UK because the British-Swedish pharmaceutical company had reportedly fallen short of its contracted deliveries to the bloc.
Ursula von der Leyen, the commission president, last week demanded “reciprocity” after she disclosed that factories in the EU had sent 21 million jabs to the UK since December but had received none in return.
UK-EU negotiations will focus on
defining “reciprocity” and whether and how a deal could take into account investment in vaccine development.
British officials will argue the EU has benefited from £84million in funding for the manufacture of the AstraZeneca jab, developed by scientists at Oxford University. Without this, the UK will say, there would be no vaccine at all.
The UK is pushing for its per capita investment to be part of the calculations as it is a single country rather than the 27-member states of the bloc. According to the Government’s spending review, it paid £6billion to develop and procure Covid-19 vaccines.
The UK also exports raw materials to the Pfizer vaccine plant in Belgium. It plans to spend almost £15 billion in 2021-22, to include funding for research on drugs, treatments and vaccines.
Maros Sefcovic, the European Commission vice-president, said investment would be taken into consideration. One diplomat said he was not surprised at the UK demand, saying it “seemed fair”. But he warned the EU would also want German investment in the development of the Pfizer jab to be considered.
The story of the EU v UK vaccine fight is simple. Britain acted fast and did brilliantly well; the EU dragged its heels and let its citizens down. But it is important to understand that the UK’s success was not luck, let alone some fantastical conspiracy with manufacturers: it was the product of a smarter way of doing business that is the corollary of our campaign for independence. We procured alone, took a risk, tapped into business know-how and, crucially, invested in success.
That is effectively the argument our negotiators have been putting to the EU in talks over AstraZeneca supplies. The Commission threatened to block any shipment of vaccines from the company’s plant in the Netherlands to Britain because, it says, AstraZeneca has fallen short of its contracted deliveries to the EU. The UK Government points out, rightly, that it is not just the case that we did a better job of negotiating for jabs and building supply chains, we also chose to invest more than £88million to develop and scale up manufacturing of AstraZeneca’s product – as part of a wider £6billion overall investment in vaccines – and without that cash there would arguably be no vaccine at all.
The EU has benefited from our generosity: we’ve helped the vaccine to become more widely available, which we did as a single country, not part of a bloc made up of 27 member states. Britain’s actions will ultimately pay dividends for everyone. Both sides want to see the vaccine row settled amicably, but the long-term lesson is that small can be beautiful. While Britain has been nimble and resourceful, the Commission looks like a flailing giant.