How delays in the EU’s Covid-19 vaccine roll-out programme could cost Europe dearly

The EU’s vaccination campaign has been hampered by a botched, centralised procurement strategy overseen by the European Commission. To make matters worse, Brussels has tried to deflect blame and curb vaccine exports

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A nursing home resident gets a Covid-19 vaccine injection in Cologne, Germany. Although a German company, BioNTech, developed one of the vaccines, Germany – like the rest of the European Union – is well behind other developed economies in vaccinations. Photo: AP

Published: 10:45pm, 4 Feb 2021Updated: 10:45pm, 4 Feb 2021

Last summer, the European Union appeared to have brought the Covid-19 pandemic under control, allowing economies to reopen more quickly, and giving ammunition to investors who argued that European stocks would begin to outperform their peers in the United States – which at the time was suffering a second wave of infections – following years of underperformance.

Fast forward six months, and the leading economies in the EU have had to reimpose nationwide lockdowns to combat a fierce resurgence of the virus, the bloc as a whole is on the verge of a double-dip recession and, most worryingly, the roll-out of vaccines has been beset by delays and missteps.

That this is all happening at a time when the legitimacy and credibility of the EU’s institutions are facing their biggest test since the euro-zone debt crisis a decade ago makes Europe’s predicament all the more acute.

To be sure, the EU is not alone among advanced economies in struggling to contain the spread of the virus and deliver vaccines effectively. In the US – which accounts for 25 per cent of the world’s confirmed cases and 20 per cent of total fatalities – more than 95,000 people died from Covid-19 in January, the deadliest month since the pandemic erupted.

Moreover, the new administration is confronting the same problems in administering vaccines as its predecessor: poor coordination between the federal and state governments, compounding logistical challenges.

In Britain, which has emerged as one of the most successful countries in the global race to get shots in people’s arms, new variants of the pathogen have acquired mutations, making them more transmissible and imperilling vaccine efficacy.

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