EU CLOTS PLAY DANGEROUS POLITICAL GAME.

The actions of various European Union member countries in suspending use of the Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccine appear to have caused consternation everywhere. Claims that the vaccine is potentially dangerous, causing recipients to suffer life threatening blood clots, have been made although the evidence is scant if not non-existent.

The medicines' regulator in the UK, a country in which many millions have now received this particular vaccine without ill-effect, can find no evidence of danger. The World Health Organisation has discovered no cause for alarm and it's reported that even Europe's own regulator doesn't believe there is any issue to resolve. Experts on the use of vaccines have said that there is always a risk of blood clots arising in any population but that the claimed incidence amongst those in Europe who've had this particular 'jab' is actually lower than amongst the general population. 

So what is going on ?

Firstly, the EU has an ongoing dispute with AstraZeneca over vaccine supply and is unhappy about the speed of delivery; in typical EU style, its leaders refuse to accept that its own late ordering has contributed to its problems and, instead, want to lay the blame at the door of AstraZeneca. They have even gone so far as to propose banning the export of vaccines from the EU in order to safeguard their own supplies, a move roundly condemned by the rest of the world.

Secondly, a direct consequence of the EU's own failure to act quickly last year and a corollary of the first point, they have found themselves short of supplies and slow to get their own vaccination programmes up to speed. Politically, this has been disastrous for them, with people rightly angry that they cannot get the protection they need. Additionally, Germany and France are both approaching important elections, those for the Bundestag in September of this year and for the French Presidency early next. Angela Merkel's CDU party is in trouble in the former and Emmanuel Macron is not everyone's choice for the latter - both have reasons to try to divert attention from their own, and the EU's, failings. Italy is always in both political and financial crisis and the EU as a whole is in an almighty mess, financially and otherwise.

And so we have the latest row over vaccines. What better way to avoid blame and to save the people from further harm than to find some problem with the AstraZeneca vaccine. As well as demonstrating that they are protecting their populations from a dangerous vaccine, they can also cover up supply shortages by simply stopping vaccination programmes for apparently good medical reasons. Even further, they get to cast doubt on the efficacy of the vaccine produced by their current bête-noire, and to damage them. It just adds to the EU's joy that the this vaccine is produced by a part-British company and is linked to a major British university.

No doubt the EU's medicines' regulator will eventually state that their are no dangers, other than in NOT having the vaccine, and the vaccination programmes will restart but, by then, there will have been a degree of stock piling. Everything will look much better as the numbers vaccinated climb rapidly. What this tells us is that politicians will do absolutely anything in order to gain favour with their voters, regardless of truth, benefit, or disbenefit, to those same voters.

This is political truth laid bare.

EU VACCINE DEBACLE PROVES BREXIT WAS RIGHT !

Thank God we left the dysfunctional European Union !!!!

Having left the EU at the end of January 2020, the United Kingdom was then free to make its own plans and arrangements for dealing with the worldwide Coronavirus epidemic. The UK government agreed contracts with several companies for the supply of millions of doses of vaccines and 2 of those vaccines are now being injected into the arms of UK citizens at the rate of more than 2 million a week. 

But what has happened in the European Union ?

Being a group of 27 countries which are almost forbidden to act independently on matters of any importance, they're in a right old mess. The 27 had to agree on a way forward and so were slow to negotiate for supplies of the vaccines. Now, of course, they deny this and claim to have obtained a better price than other nations - such as the UK and USA - but are also at the back of the queue when it comes to supply. This they do not like.

One of the main producers of vaccines, the UK based pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, agreed a deal with the EU but has now found itself unable to supply the number of doses initially agreed due to production problems. Quite simply, it doesn't have the current capacity to satisfy demand and is having to create new facilities, which will take time. The EU doesn't like this one bit and is accusing the company of prioritising supplies to other countries, notably the UK, over supplies to its 27 member states. The EU is threatening various reprisals against the company and is also threatening to introduce curbs on exports of vaccines produced within its borders, seemingly regardless of contractual arrangements that may exist.

Among the various lessons taught to the world by  COVID-19, one is surely that a conglomeration of disparate countries relying on a central government to manage their affairs is a bad idea. When vital decisions are delayed due to a need to satisfy convoluted and time consuming ratification processes it's surely time to quit. The EU itself, with its Commission, Parliament, European Council and Council of the EU, is bad enough, but when individual countries (and in some cases regions) also have to have their say, it's utterly unmanageable in a time of crisis, if not always.

Of course, those who sit at the top of this vast edifice will never admit that there's a problem; if things go wrong, it must be the other party that's at fault, in this case AstraZeneca, the UK, perhaps the Boogeyman, for all I know. The knee jerk reaction is to cry "FOUL !", threaten legal action and assorted penalties for the perceived wrongdoers, and of course, use it as an excuse for demanding "MORE EUROPE, NOT LESS !".

If the UK was still a member of this dreadful organisation we would have been unable to take our own path in tackling COVID-19; we would not already have vaccinated well over 6 million people and be on course to vaccinate all of our most vulnerable citizens by mid-February. In fact we would barely have started vaccinating anyone.

If ever there was a clear proof that leaving the European Union was the right thing, indeed the only sensible thing, to do, it's this current debacle. How long will it be before other countries, hard hit by the virus and now struggling to cope under the dead hand of the EU's all-encompassing central bureaucracy, come to the same conclusion ?