“I’m pro-European, but…” Those in favour of the European project often start sentences about the EU’s vaccine problems this way. In the UK they then tend to add that Brexit was nonetheless a mistake. On the Continent, they disavow “vaccine nationalism” and ministers tiptoe around failings as if they were unexploded bombs. The EU itself has been cagey on the terms of its procurement agreements and reluctant to apologise. The pro Europeans all have the same fear: that in a turbulent age in which a fundamentally good project is under strain, criticising it gives oxygen to its nationalist opponents.
The bare facts of the EU’s vaccine roll-out require no Eurosceptic spin to be damning. On 31 January France vaccinated 4,560 people. Britain, a country of similar population size, wealth, level of centralisation and pharmaceutical strengths, jabbed 319,038. The EU has vaccinated about three in every 100 people; the UK has vaccinated about 14. I have roughly as many close friends and relatives, of a similar range of ages, in the UK as I do in Germany, where I live. I know about ten jab recipients in the UK and not one here.
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