Throughout the long and agonizing debate about Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union, one of the few positions the EU has never wavered from is its insistence that there could be no barrier to trade between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. A “hard border” across the island, it was feared, would pose a serious threat to security in the region. In late 2020, Britain and the EU finally signed a trade agreement that kept the Irish border open. It took the EU only a month to try to close it.
Last Friday, as part of an effort to restrict vaccine exports, the EU unleashed an article in the Brexit withdrawal agreement to prevent EU COVID-19 vaccines from entering Northern Ireland – a move that could have result in the creation of border checks. The article allows parts of the agreement to be unilaterally canceled in order to “avoid serious social difficulties”, and the EU’s fear was that, amid vaccine shortages, Northern Ireland would be used as a back door for the provision of European vaccines enter the UK
The EU gave up on the plan within hours after it was attacked by the British and Irish governments, but the disaster showed that there are limits to the bloc’s dedication to free trade and open borders, at least during a pandemic. “Vaccine nationalism” is here and will probably last for a while.
Vaccine nationalism is the notion that, instead of working together to defeat the virus as quickly as possible, countries will compete with each other, prioritizing their own populations. This dynamic is particularly obvious between the EU and the United Kingdom. The context of the most recent dispute is that vaccine implantation in the EU is not going well. While the United Kingdom has already distributed 16.2 doses of vaccine per 100 people, and the United States has distributed 10.5, Germany has distributed only 3.6 and France only 2.7, according to Our World in Data. Denmark, the bloc’s leading vaccination country, has only applied 5.2 vaccines per 100 people. (These are total vaccines, not complete vaccines, which require two doses.) There are several reasons for the delay. Although the EU has signed contracts for more than 2 billion vaccines, it has been slower than other developed countries to grant regulatory approval for medicines. For example, while the UK approved the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine on December 2 and the US followed suit the following week, the EU did not grant approval until December 21. It was also slower to negotiate contracts with drug manufacturers. Unlike the US, the EU only offered partial protection to drug manufacturers for liability in the event of side effects, which also delayed negotiations. While there is much to criticize about the US government’s COVID response last year, he was more proactive than other governments in contracting facilities to provide “fill and finish” services to bring vaccines to market. In fact, Johnson & Johnson recently announced that it would send vaccines destined for Europe to the United States for filling and finishing, heightening EU fears of further delays.
In all of these processes, the EU structure – requiring contributions from member states, emphasizing charges and profit sharing – is not an advantage in terms of efficiency. On the other hand, it is an advantage for smaller and less wealthy European countries, which would probably be even further behind if they were forced to trade on their own.
Brexiteers were quick to take advantage of the EU’s struggles as a justification. British health secretary Matt Hancock said the rapid process of approval and distribution of the vaccine in the UK shows the advantages of Brexit. This is not true: the approval of the Pfizer vaccine took place while the UK was still under EU regulations, which allow member states to make their own drug approvals in emergencies. And, as European officials have pointed out, BioNTech, the German co-developer of the vaccine, received substantial EU funding for its research. Still, the current state of affairs in the vaccine war, at least it seems the kind of thing License voters were trying to escape, and pro-Brexit politicians are likely to continue playing this.
Things started to get really ugly in late January, when the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca announced it was cutting its initial delivery of its recently approved EU vaccine to the EU to 31 million doses in late March from 80 million due to delays in manufacturing in one of its European factories, and was accused by the EU of breach of contract. To make matters worse, the United Kingdom, where AstraZeneca is based and where the vaccine has been approved since late December, has two factories operating at full capacity and will not face failures. AstraZeneca has refused to divert vaccines produced in the UK to the continent, which has angered EU officials who say Britain does not have the inherent right to vaccines produced on its soil. All of this comes along with the news that Pfizer also faces delays at its European factories.
Under public pressure to deal with the delays, the EU passed a regulation instructing customs authorities to block vaccine exports to 100 countries around the world, unless they receive explicit authorization from EU governments. Most developing countries, including those that are part of the World Health Organization’s COVAX vaccine distribution scheme, will not be affected by the rule, but the United Kingdom, the USA, Canada and Australia will be.
The EU’s action has been criticized by World Health Organization leaders as an example of “vaccine nationalism” and it is difficult to challenge the description. But isn’t there also a form of “nationalism” in the argument that only the EU should suffer from a deficit in European factories when drugs are produced next door?
Prashant Yadav, who studies global health supply chains at the Center for Global Development, says the EU case “raises some very complicated questions” about the future of global drug distribution. “We have to respect that vaccine supply chains are inherently global,” he says. “But what does a global supply chain mean? If you have a disability on one of your sites, who bears the impact of the disability? ”A truly global model, suggests Yadav, would require what experts call a“ turntable ”model, where the impact is shared equally by all parties. In other words, if a factory’s production is 10% lower, all countries that should receive medicine from that factory will have a 10% reduction.
“If only one region is impacted, then you have accepted that the supply chain is not really global,” says Yadav.
Health officials fear the EU measure will have a ripple effect as more countries ban exports to protect their supplies. This could have the most damaging effect in less developed countries that are already struggling to secure vaccine supplies. In a speech at the World Economic Forum last week, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa condemned vaccine nationalism, saying: “The rich countries of the world are clinging to these vaccines and we are saying ‘Release the excess vaccines that you have ordered and accumulated. ‘There is simply no need for a country that may have around 40 million people to go and purchase 120 million doses or even 160 million, yet the world needs access to these vaccines. “
The resulting scarcity is not a problem confined only to the poorest countries. New and more dangerous variants of the virus have recently emerged in South Africa and Brazil, which could hinder global efforts to control the pandemic as it spreads.
Yadav is also concerned that, while the specific disputes caused by EU measures can still be resolved, the precedent he sets will undermine the overall efficiency of vaccine distribution efforts in the future.
“Everyone will remember this for decades,” he says.