“We are going to become a friendly neighbor, the best friend and ally of the European Union [UE] could have. “ This December 30, 2020, Boris Johnson speaks before the House of Commons. The British Prime Minister is even more leaping than usual, all to his enthusiasm for having managed to complete a “post-Brexit” agreement with Brussels, and driven by the imminent arrival of a vaccine against the Covid-19 “Made in Britain”, designed by the University of Oxford, produced by the Anglo-Swedish giant AstraZeneca.
A month later, the messages of friendship are no longer relevant between Brussels and London: the European Commission has engaged in a standoff against AstraZeneca – which has announced to the Twenty-Seven smaller deliveries than expected in the first quarter -, and it decided, Friday, January 29, to carry out an export control of vaccines at the community borders, from which dozens of countries are exempt, but not the United Kingdom.
She suspects AstraZeneca of delivering across the Channel vaccines, produced on the continent, that the laboratory should have reserved for the Twenty-Seven. “The current customs investigation seems to indicate it”, let a source know.
For the British, this attitude is perceived as unfairly aggressive and they are worried that it will derail their so far successful vaccination campaign (more than 13% of the population had received a dose, Saturday, January 30).
The tension was further increased when it turned out, to everyone’s surprise, on Friday evening, that the Commission’s export control mechanism had the collateral damage of suspending the application of the “Northern Irish protocol” – part of the divorce treaty between the two former partners.
Commission blunder
In order to control the exchange of vaccines between the EU and the island, the Commission has indeed sought to reintroduce controls between the British province of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, a member of the EU… Back a border between the two Ireland? Precisely what Michel Barnier, the ex-chief Brexit negotiator for the EU, sought to avoid at all costs during the four years that the negotiations with London lasted, in order to preserve the fragile North peace process. Irish.
In fact, the Commission made a huge mistake. Exasperated by the announcement of AstraZeneca, which on Friday, January 22, declared that deliveries to Europeans of its vaccine in the first quarter would be 60% lower than expected, then by the statements of its CEO, Pascal Soriot, who explained that the British would be served before the Europeans because they had signed a contract with the Anglo-Swedish laboratory three months earlier, she lost her most basic political reflexes.
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