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Anglo-American Vaccine Nationalism Versus EU Technocratic Liberalism

Guess which one is winning?
Boris Johnson

Chris Bickerton, an expert on the European Union, has a damning piece up at the New York Times today about the EU’s failure to vaccinate its own people. The EU had assumed power over vaccine procurement from European member governments, insisting that could lead a continent-wide anti-COVID campaign. Now, the statistical disparities are eye-watering:

By the third week of May, the United States and Britain had administered over 80 doses per 100 inhabitants; the E.U. had managed 43.6 doses per 100 residents. Slow to start, subject to shortages in supply and in some cases poorly targeted, the continent’s vaccine rollout has been disastrous. The result has been a long and drawn-out third wave of the virus, leading to lockdowns, economic contraction and many deaths.

Britain and America have vaccinated almost double the number of people proportionately as has the European behemoth state. Why is this happening? One reason listed by Bickerton is that the EU has used the vaccine campaign as yet another excuse to consolidate its own power:

By centralizing vaccine procurement in its hands, it sought greater control over the bloc’s health policy. Such transfers of responsibility are rarely reversed, even if the policies themselves are a failure. This is what Professor Majone called “integration by stealth.”

A centralized vaccine strategy would also, leaders suggested, give meaning to an E.U. struggling to find its place in a challenging geopolitical environment, demonstrating the bloc’s capacity to unite. Yet the attempt amounted to an enormous institutional experiment conducted amid a global health crisis. It was a breathtakingly reckless gamble that didn’t come off.

For EU watchers, this is pure deja vu. Everything the European Union tries to do morphs into an attempt to gobble up sovereignty from member governments. It’s the same story time and again: some problem is hailed as an opportunity for continent-wide unity, the blue flags no one ever salutes fly, the anthem no one can recite blares—and the EU sets about mucking everything up. It’s only a shame we don’t have Nigel Farage in the European Parliament to offer his views on this latest failure.

There are more granular reasons why the EU is lagging so badly. The bloc tried to play hardball with the pharmaceutical companies, negotiating down prices, while the Yanks and Brits were throwing money at the problem; this relegated Europe to the back of the line so far as supply was concerned. And the British/Swiss drug corporation AstraZeneca, whose vaccinations were halted in the U.S. over concerns about blood clotting, has reportedly struggled to deliver shots in both the UK and the EU.

Still, it was farcical to hear European commissioner Thierry Breton declare to the media last month, “So I can say that the turbulence we have experienced is solely due to AstraZeneca’s failure to deliver.” Solely! Again, the pattern: the EU assumes control of something, everything promptly flies up into the air and explodes, and suddenly it’s someone else’s responsibility. Europe’s poor, meek, Bambi-eyed continental overlords just can’t catch a break.

Meanwhile, economic optimism in Britain and America is surging. I know we have a lot of problems here in the United States, from inflation to gas lines to political tension. But let’s take a minute to be thankful that we don’t live under a technocratic blob addicted to the imperialism of “ever-closer union.”

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