By John Chalmers and Andrew MacAskill
BRUSSELS / LONDON (Reuters) – EU officials on Saturday confessed to a “blunder” in invoking Brexit’s emergency powers in Northern Ireland during a clash with Britain over vaccines, and London said it hoped its supply of COVID-19 shots is not interrupted.
The European Union fell far behind Britain and the United States in the race to vaccinate its public. She announced on Friday that she would impose export controls on vaccines, widely seen as a threat to prevent doses being sent to Britain.
But he was forced to reverse part of the announcement within hours after Britain and Ireland complained about plans to impose emergency vaccine export controls across the British-controlled land border between Ireland and Northern Ireland.
“They recognized that they made a mistake and I believe that we can now focus on ensuring that our vaccine program is successful,” Michael Gove, British cabinet minister, told Sky News.
Britain’s Secretary of Foreign Affairs, Dominic Raab, tweeted: “I was at ease, as the EU does not want to block suppliers who fulfill vaccine distribution contracts for the UK.”
“The world is watching and it is only through international collaboration that we will overcome this pandemic.”
“SIMPLY AND CLEARLY MORE LATHE”
EU officials recognized that the decision to invoke emergency powers to control trade across the border with Northern Ireland was a mistake. Preventing border controls was the central issue in five years of Brexit negotiations.
“It is much better to realize early on that something can be a problem and change it, than to stick to your weapons and dig a hole for yourself,” an EU official said on Saturday.
“As soon as it became apparent that there would be political difficulty and sensitivity there, particularly on the Irish and Northern Irish side, we decided to withdraw it.”
Another EU official called the drama “simply and clearly a blunder.”
EU politicians are under intense pressure to explain why their countries have administered only a fraction of the vaccinations achieved in Britain, which left the single market four weeks ago.
EU officials were furious earlier this month when Swedish-British pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca announced that most doses of the vaccine it had promised to deliver to the EU in March would be delayed due to production problems in Belgium.
AstraZeneca has made millions of doses in Britain, but told the EU that it could not divert any to the continent until it fulfilled a contract with London. Meanwhile, Britain has been importing doses made in the EU of a separate vaccine from Pfizer and BioNTech.
The EU announced regulations on Friday to control vaccine exports, widely seen as an implicit threat to block Pfizer shipments to Britain, unless London shares its doses of AstraZeneca.
But imposing restrictions on the border with Northern Ireland was a bridge too far, after five years of Brexit negotiations to keep it open. The issue is central to a 1988 peace agreement that ended 30 years of conflict in Northern Ireland.
Ireland’s Minister of European Affairs, Thomas Byrne, said Dublin was not consulted on the move.
“This type of provision is standard in trade agreements, but in the situation in Northern Ireland, it obviously has a different political resonance and perhaps this has not been fully appreciated by the editors,” he told Newstalk radio.
“Of course, a mistake was made,” said Byrne.
(Additional reporting by Padraic Halpin in Dublin and Jan Strupczewski in Brussels; Editing by Peter Graff)