The EU's awkward vaccine success

It was a disaster - everybody seemed to agree. Rich parts of the world were launching the first wave of the vaccine rollout and the EU looked to be way behind others. Israel, then the US and the UK, were making big gains in vaccinating their populations. And while some other rich countries like Canada were also slow to move, they could at least point to low COVID-19 rates. 

In the EU, national governments were vicious in their criticisms, blaming Brussels for failing to secure enough vaccine supply. Even the firmest defences could only say that the EU had been naive, negotiating open contracts while the US and the UK paid for protectionist exclusivity. The EU was painted as slow and lumbering - an excessively bureaucratic machine that had been played at best and had self-sabotaged at worst. Entrusted with a key part of the response to the pandemic, it appeared the EU had bungled it. 

And yet this narrative is totally out of kilter with the reality today. EU states are some of the most highly vaccinated places not just in Europe but in the whole world. The EU average has overtaken the US record on vaccinations and individually every large EU state is comfortably ahead. Within Europe, Malta and Denmark have moved ahead of the UK and others like Spain and Ireland have reached similar levels. 

If one didn't look outside of the Brexit media, it could seem that this shift in gears had simply come out of nowhere - that, like a well-paced runner in a long-distance race, the EU had simply jumped out ahead once the end was in sight, having held back their energy earlier.

This metaphor of course does not quite work. The EU was not deploying a deliberate strategy of pacing itself. If AstraZeneca had delivered the doses that it committed to in the first few months of this year, then the EU would have been able to (and would have) gone much faster in the early phases of the vaccination campaign. 

The truth is that the EU found itself caught in a tight spot through a combination of poor priorities (national governments were too reluctant to give the necessary funding to the procurement programme), the stumbling blocks of an organisation that is still young (the EU has relatively little experience in managing health policy, almost entirely a national power) and factors outside of its control (missed vaccine deliveries and disruptions to global supply chains). 

But in acknowledging that the EU did not get everything right, we can see how the Union demonstrated a much more valuable skill - the ability to identify mistakes, learn from them and find solutions. It is not that the EU's vaccine programme worked out as it was always meant to (a tempting argument to make today given the strength of the vaccination turnaround), but rather that it managed to fix the very real problems it had. And not just fix them, but address them with such speed that the EU and EU states have caught up with the early frontrunners of the vaccination campaign, a feat that a number of rich developed countries like Australia, Japan or New Zealand have absolutely not been able to match.

So how was it done? Though the Brexit media spent many hours and lines of print on the export restrictions put in place in March, few exports have actually been blocked, while 200 million doses have been sent out of the EU to destinations around the world. The obsession with this (wholly misguided) policy was a political and reporting failure that meant that the real advances were obscured and most people left in the dark about how or why the EU's vaccination drive picked up. To maintain the anti-EU culture war, we were robbed of information on a major policy and what we could learn from its success.

The real work was being done behind the scenes by a man called Thierry Breton, the European Commissioner for the Internal Market. Breton was tasked with addressing a part of the EU's problem that has been much less discussed - the blocks and deficiencies within the EU's own vaccine production supply chain. 

Whether it was due to cross-border regulatory issues, a lack of available capital to invest or a simple inability to find the right partners, a significant part of the EU's industrial potential to produce vaccines at home was going unused. It was to remedy this, that Breton was put in charge of a new task force in February of this year, whose mission was to scale up vaccine production in the EU. 

And if the EU had struggled with health and procurement policy, it got back into its stride with industrial policy. 

The first step was to map out the EU's production capacity - what companies and facilities were available along different steps of the supply chain and where they were located (the current map was recently made available publicly). Although this information was essential for keeping tabs on the situation with vaccine production, the EU's highly decentralised system meant that no one had full oversight. EU officials not only got this information, they also went out to visit these sites on the ground, confirming that the capacity was really there under the motto of 'trust is good, control is better'. There would not be a repeat of the AstraZeneca problems. 

With the relevant companies identified, the Commission set up 'matchmaking' events to bring the right people into the same room (as of April approximately 300 firms had been involved). Through these forums, the EU was able to spur on the development of further partnerships in vaccine production and boost the domestic supply chain.

Finally, the task force also acted as a one-stop helpdesk to resolve any problems that companies involved in the vaccine supply chain might be facing. 

It now seems likely that the EU will be a production hub for the rest of the vaccination campaign, supplying itself and countries around the world. Meanwhile, the EU is not only thinking about exports but is also looking to establish a stronger partnership with Africa, helping the continent to move faster in developing its own vaccine production. So far the EU had pledged €1bn of total support and has already signed an investment deal with Senegal. 

There is no need to deny the EU made mistakes in the vaccine rollout. It has made other mistakes in the past and will make others in the future - just like every organisation in the world, public or private. This is not inherent to the EU but simply a reality of human nature. 

However, what does matter is that, far from being stuck in a quagmire of bureaucracy, the EU responded to this challenge with speed and control, bringing the EU's vaccination programme into the ranks of the world's top performers. The positive story for the EU is not that the vaccination rollout was actually a great achievement all along but that the EU really did manage to take failure and turn it into success.