Farage Tells Breitbart: After Europe’s Vaccine Failure, the British People Can See We Are Better Governing Ourselves

LONDON, ENGLAND - MAY 27: Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage arrives at a Brexit Party event
Peter Summers/Getty
Victoria Friedman

Brexit leader Nigel Farage has said that Britain’s vaccine success demonstrates the United Kingdom is better off governing itself, predicting that the bloc’s inoculation failure spells “the beginning of the end” of the bloc.

The EU has been criticised both in Europe and Britain for the slow process of vaccinating the citizens of the bloc’s 27 member states, with drugs company AstraZeneca blaming the Commission for taking so long in signing a contract for vaccine production. While the UK, which engaged drugs companies much sooner during the pandemic, has administered at least the first dose of a vaccine to 64.5 per cent of the population, compared to the EU where 26.5 per cent on average have had at least one shot.

Mr Farage argued that Britain’s success was down to its ability to make independent decisions without the oversight of Brussels bureaucrats. He told Breitbart News Daily‘s Alex Marlow on Wednesday: “One of the arguments against Brexit was that we weren’t big enough, good enough, to make big decisions on trade, or even on health pandemics. The idea was that when it came to health pandemics, it would be the unelected European Commission [that would] deal with this.

“Having left the European Union, we appointed our own boss of vaccine distribution and do you know what? It’s been done brilliantly, it’s been done efficiently.

“Sixty per cent of the adult population have been vaccinated, all of the vulnerable have been vaccinated.”

Compared to “across the water on mainland Europe”, the “unelected bureaucrat”, European Commission Health Minister Stella Kyriakides, “a woman from Cyprus with a degree in psychology with no basic life skills at all, who hasn’t been voted for, and can’t [be] removed… has made a total and utter mess of it”, Mr Farage said.

The Brexit leader remarked that “the British people see this” and can reflect, post-Brexit: “‘Actually, do you know what? We’re better off governing ourselves through our own elected government than allowing these decisions to get taken elsewhere.'”

Earlier this year, Mr Farage had predicted that not only would British vaccine progress prove to Britons they were right to leave the EU, but that it might reveal to Europeans how incompetent the top Eurocrats that govern them truly are.

Mr Farage wrote in January: “If this crisis has taught us anything, it is that the best decisions are taken by national governments acting in their national interest. It is for this reason that I say Europe must leave the European Union. All of us who believe that the best decisions are taken by national governments which are directly accountable to their electorates need to make this crystal clear. With lives at stake, is it not our duty to do so?”

The actual outcome of the vaccine race in Europe has stood in astonishing contrast to the claims made at the start of the Coronavirus outbreak, when it was smugly claimed in the pro-Brussels press that Britain would get vaccines slower and more expensively than Europe because it had foolishly decided to go its own way on health, and not pool resources with the EU. In a complete reversal of the spirit of those early predictions, the fanatically pro-Europe Tony Blair now claims the EU has fared so badly recently because the United Kingdom left the bloc and is no longer a positive influence on the political decision-makers in Brussels.

Farage has said that the crisis would be the next crack in the Euro bloc’s credibility following Brexit, which would lead to its eventual dissolution. He told Breitbart News’s Alex Marlow that “for the European Union, the beginning of the end has started”.

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