BRUSSELS – People on television were happy: the jubilant British were receiving the world’s first injections of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in early December.
Less happy were many people watching in Germany, where the vaccine was created even where the government was telling citizens that it would take weeks before they could launch their own vaccination program.
“Millions get a German vaccine, but we have to keep waiting,” read the headline in the Berlin BZ tabloid. “The world is vaccinating – not Germany,” said Focus magazine.
For Germans and other Europeans, it has been particularly unpleasant to see the United States and Britain, which have been less disciplined in their blockades and pandemic precautions, taking a leap forward in the vaccine race. In fact, former President Donald J. Trump and Prime Minister Boris Johnson had even more incentives to cling to vaccines as their countries became the most affected in the world.
There is no doubt that the European Union was wrong in many of the first steps to prepare vaccines. It was slower off target, overly focused on prices, while the United States and Britain had no problem with dollars and pounds, and succumbed to an abundance of regulatory caution. All of these things perplexed the block, as the pharmaceutical companies did not follow through on the promised orders.
But the 27 countries of the European Union are also trying something they have never tried before and have broken yet another barrier to their deeper integration – albeit unsteadily – by choosing to launch their lot together in the hunt for vaccines.
In doing so, they inverted the block’s usual power equation. Larger and wealthier countries like Germany and France – which could have afforded to sign contracts directly with drug manufacturers, as the United States and Britain did – have seen their vaccine campaigns delayed by the heaviest joint effort, while smaller countries ended up with better supply conditions than they probably negotiated on their own.
For most EU nations, this experience has been beneficial. But it was not necessarily welcomed with joy in the richest and most disadvantaged countries, and left leaders like Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President Emmanuel Macron of France open to internal criticism.
Even so, they and EU leaders maintained their decision and the drive for solidarity, even when the accusations began.
“What would people have said if Germany and France were competing with each other for the purchase or production of vaccines? That would have been chaos, ”Macron told a news conference on Friday after a virtual meeting with Merkel. “That would have been counterproductive, economically and from a public health perspective, because we will only get out of this pandemic when we have vaccinated enough people in Europe.”
But even when the leaders of Europe’s traditional power duo talked about the 2.3 billion doses ordered as an indication of the wisdom of a joint approach, they admitted that a full campaign could not be expected before March, leaving the block stuck in controversy and recrimination and maybe a little regret.
With just over 3 percent of EU citizens having received at least one dose of a vaccine by the end of last week, in stark contrast to Britain’s 17 percent and the United States’ 9 percent, nowhere the delay hurt more than in Germany, the bloc’s biggest economy and de facto leader.
“I must have called the hotline 100 times,” said Klaus Kater, 80, a retired lawyer in Germany who said he spent two days redialing before he was able to speak with health officials in his home state, Lower Saxony.
His efforts put him on a waiting list, he said. “They asked me how to let me know when my turn comes, so I said to send me a letter, just in case.” He had no idea when this could be.
Certainly, not all of these problems – like poorly equipped telephone lines – are the fault of the European Union. But as frustrations build up, the block has become an easy-going guy for all sorts of vaccine-related problems that weren’t meant to be solved in the first place.
Experts say Germany could have been potentially quicker in getting vaccines for its population if it had acted on its own, but in the end it would have been a disaster to abandon the EU’s joint effort in many other ways.
“It would have been a catastrophe for Germany to break away from joint acquisition, politically, but also economically if Germany alone had secured the vaccine and the rest did not,” said Guntram Wolff, director of the Brussels-based research institute Bruegel.
Wolff added that, as Germany is at the center of Europe’s open labor market and shares borders with nine other countries, ensuring that the entire bloc receives vaccines is not only a political issue, but also of self-interest.
“Most EU countries would have found it very difficult to negotiate contracts and secure supplies on their own,” said Wolff. “And I think the pharmaceutical companies themselves have also preferred the centralized approach.”
Still, Merkel has struggled to defend her government’s decision to make Germany give up the opportunity to purchase its own vaccine.
In March 2020, when Italians died on stretchers outside crowded hospitals, the German and French governments blocked exports of essential protective equipment, such as masks.
It was a disastrous time for Europe, a time that its leaders quickly decided that it should not be repeated, as the pandemic dominated the bloc’s economies and closed their societies, and Britain finally left the union after four years of painful negotiations.
Public health is generally handled by individual member states, but a decision has been made to empower the European Commission, the much-maligned and boring administrative arm based in Brussels, to lead the negotiations to secure vaccines.
It was already June, and Europe was already four months behind the United States and three from Britain in approaching pharmaceutical companies.
More recently, the vaccine race has been seen, correct or not, through the Brexit prism. The Johnson administration, in particular, cited its leadership in vaccine distribution as evidence that the formal departure from the bloc at the beginning of the new year was the right thing to do.
At the very least, it put Britain and the European Union in competition and raised the grudge when Swedish-British company AstraZeneca informed Brussels in January that it would reduce planned vaccine deliveries to the bloc due to production difficulties, while supplied Britain with its complete order.
EU officials have accused the company of prioritizing its home country, while AstraZeneca said Britain’s three-month ordering advantage has given the company time to smooth out production failures similar to those that EU supply is facing.
To appease critics, Ms. Merkel resorted to explaining to the public the difficulties involved in vaccine production, pointing to more production facilities in the United States and Britain as reasons for these countries to start their campaigns earlier.
“I think, in general, nothing went wrong,” Merkel told public broadcaster ARD on Tuesday, the day after the meeting. “Of course, the question arises: why is the United States faster, why is Israel faster, why is the United Kingdom faster? It irritates, of course, ”she added, without offering an answer.
Other important European leaders have sought to overcome the turmoil of recent weeks over deliveries of derailed vaccines.
Since the bloc’s confrontation with AstraZeneca, in which it adopted protectionist measures to squeeze the company and almost imploded already fragile relations with Britain, a more forward-looking sense of self-reflection and action has taken hold in Brussels.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who has suffered severe personal criticism for her way of handling the vaccine procurement process, admitted that Europe disregarded the difficulty in producing the vaccine.
“The initiation of vaccination does not mean a continuous flow of doses of vaccine coming from the industry,” Ms. Von der Leyen told European news agencies this month. “This is a bitter part of learning, and we certainly underestimate it.”
Ms. Von der Leyen also hired Moncef Slaoui, a senior Belgian-American pharmaceutical executive who worked at Operation Warp Speed in the USA as a consultant, and European leaders gently tried to push her into a more proactive approach with the new vaccines. that are showing promising signs.
Preparing vaccines is complicated, as Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote in an editorial, adding that the government’s real failure was a failure to communicate this effectively to the public.
“Germany shares the fate of the slow pace of immunization with the rest of the world, with very few exceptions,” wrote the newspaper in an editorial on Tuesday. “Despite all the impatience and exhaustion, even science and technology have limits.”
Even so, despite political reflections that point to a time of “mistakes made, lessons learned” for the European Commission, the most difficult part of correcting the bloc’s course and accelerating vaccination will be changing attitudes within the institutions that drive the process .
“I would like to say that when we are constantly trying to compare ourselves with the United States, we shouldn’t have any complexes,” said the commission’s senior vaccine worker and head of its health division, Sandra Gallina, at a parliamentary hearing last week.
“I’m not jealous of what Biden is doing, because in reality the situation here in Europe is, I can say, better,” she said.
Matina Stevis-Gridneff reported from Brussels and Melissa Eddy from Berlin. Monika Pronczuk contributed reports.