Hugely interesting article in the Times btw - its behind a pay wall though.
If you don't have a subscription consider getting one.
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/boris-johnson-building-alliance-to-stop-eu-blocking-vaccine-supplies-j3pknjxkl
Britain is building an alliance against Brussels, Germany, France and Italy to prevent a European Union vaccine export ban hitting crucial supplies of Pfizer-BioNTech jabs.
Boris Johnson spoke to Alexander De Croo, the Belgian prime minister, last night because Belgium, where the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is manufactured, is opposed to export bans.
The prime minister contacted De Croo, who has been critical of him in the past, to try to ensure that vaccine supplies are not blocked and because Belgium plays a key role with France and Italy.
“We discussed our efforts to tackle Covid-19. We also touched on the importance of global supply chains and on common efforts to speed up vaccine production,” De Croo said after what he described as a “good call”.
The new round of frantic vaccine diplomacy comes before an EU meeting next Thursday with the aim, said sources, of ensuring that deliveries of the Pfizer-BioNTech jab are not disrupted, jeopardising Britain’s vaccine programme and poisoning already tense relations with the EU irreversibly.
Belgium, Ireland, the Netherlands, Poland and Sweden are against the threat made by Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, to stop exports.
The Belgian government is concerned that export bans would damage the pharmaceutical industry, especially Pfizer’s huge Puurs production site, by damaging supply chains that rely on international trade, including British factories.
On Wednesday von der Leyen, the former German defence minister, who is very close to Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, threatened to trigger emergency powers allowing the EU to seize vaccines or take control of factories that are making jabs earmarked for export.
She said that the EU was targeting Britain as “country No 1” because AstraZeneca was not meeting European delivery promises while supplying the government with jabs from its two British factories.
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Following her ultimatum Johnson phoned von der Leyen directly on Wednesday evening to ask what was going on, why she had not spoken to him first, and to seek assurances given last month that the UK would get the Pfizer-BioNTech jabs it had paid for.
Officials and diplomats said Germany, France and Italy support the plan to ratchet up the pressure on Britain, which is being blamed for the EU’s slow rollout of jabs.
The three countries’ governments are concerned that their flagging vaccine rollouts amid increased infections and new lockdown restrictions will tear down Germany’s Christian Democrats in the September elections, damage Emmanuel Macron ahead of presidential votes in France next spring and wound Mario Draghi, Italy’s technocrat prime minister.
In return for continued exports the EU hawks are demanding “reciprocal and proportionate” vaccine exports from the UK’s AstraZeneca factories. This would require the pharmaceutical company to honour its European contract by reneging on its commitments to the government, which funded the vaccine’s development.
“I support the announcements made by the president of the European Commission and the decisions taken to require all laboratories to honour the orders on which they have committed themselves with the Europeans and in particular to demand reciprocity,” Macron said on Wednesday.
On the other side are countries including Ireland, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden and Belgium who fear that export bans to Britain will severely damage their economies as well as unleash an unprecedented conflict in peacetime.
The EU is escalating vaccine tensions at a time when European governments have stockpiled 18.5 million doses that are going unused, of which 7.2 million are made by AstraZeneca. “This is not rational,” said one EU diplomat opposed to export bans. “It will not end well.”
The doves warn that stopping shipments under contract or seizing production would tear down the international supply chains that Europe’s pharmaceutical industry is built on.
One diplomat said that Pfizer’s supplies of vaccine, with 200 million EU doses expected by the end of June, would quickly grind to a halt if British factories making it were disrupted by what would quickly become tit-for-tat export bans.
“It would be like that moment in Reservoir Dogs. If the EU pulls the trigger everyone’s guns go off and we are all dead,” a diplomatic source said.