Eurocrat Heading Vaccine Fiasco Implied UK Compromised Safety with Rapid Vax Rollout

European Commission President Ursula Von Der Leyen delivers a speech during the presentati
PATRICIA DE MELO MOREIRA/AFP via Getty Images
Victoria Friedman

After struggling to apportion blame for the bloc’s disastrous inoculation programme on drugs company AstraZeneca, Ursula von der Leyen has now taken to claiming that the EU should be proud of being so far behind the United Kingdom, implying that Brexit Britain had compromised on safety to become the Western world’s first to approve a vaccine for the Chinese coronavirus.

The president of the European Commission, the EU’s powerful executive arm, has been criticised at home for overseeing the delays in securing contracts with drugs companies which have resulted in fewer than three per cent on average of EU-27 residents receiving their first dose. In contrast, the UK has injected almost 14.5 per cent.

Rather than accept the blame for what one German editor branded the “biggest confidence-destroying programme” in the EU’s history, von der Leyen told European newspapers: “I understand the anger and the emotion. But I am convinced that the European vaccination strategy is the right one.”

Revealing that vaccine programmes will not be starting in Europe in earnest until the Spring, the former German defence minister said, according to The Times: “Some countries started to vaccinate a little before Europe, it is true. But they resorted to emergency, 24-hour marketing authorisation procedures.”

“The commission and the member states agreed not to compromise on the safety and efficacy requirements linked to the authorisation of a vaccine,” she said.

Adding: “So, yes, Europe left it later, but it was the right decision. I remind you that a vaccine is the injection of an active biological substance into a healthy body. We are talking about mass vaccination here. It is a gigantic responsibility.”

In fact, Brussels has approved all three vaccines authorised for use in the UK in recent months, in some cases just three weeks later. The UK approved the use of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine December 2nd, with the EU’s European Medicines Agency (EMA) authorising it on the 21st. The UK also green-lighted the Moderna vaccine on January 8th, followed a day later by the bloc.

Britain signed off on the Oxford-AstraZeneca shot on December 30th. The safety-conscious bloc was in the throes of threatening to block AstraZeneca vaccines from export to the UK, demanding British-made doses, and even ordered a raid on one of the pharmaceutical’s Belgian plants before the EMA had even authorised the product for use (on January 29th).

Commission President von der Leyen also downplayed what could have resulted in the breaching of the Belfast Agreement when she ordered — and then rescinded — an internal border on the isle of Ireland, saying: “I know how sensitive the Irish subject is. But when you take urgent decisions — in this year of crisis, the commission has taken almost 900 — there is always a risk of missing something.”

As well as refusing to apologise for the bloc’s vaccine fiasco, the German politician has also said that she will not resign — despite diplomats in Brussels reportedly calling for her to do so.

“Let’s wait until the end of the term to see the successes and mistakes and then we will take stock,” she said, according to The Telegraph. Mrs von der Leyen was appointed to head the Commission in 2019, and her term expires at the end of 2024.

The Belgium-born German politician was known in Germany for her procurement failures as defence minister, according to Bild political editor Peter Tiede, who wrote this week in the British press that the European Commission is where failed politicians from across the Continent are deposited like “nuclear waste”.

“Von der Leyen has either knowingly lied to 447 million Europeans or didn’t know what she was talking about. Both are intolerable,” Mr Tiede wrote in The Times.

He also criticised domestic European governments which “either did not intervene or intervened too late”, and which now must look on with embarrassment at the success of the United Kingdom, “the island that once belonged to our EU. It is embarrassing because now we are the fools.”

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