How Brexit Saved Britainhttps://freebeacon.com/coronavirus/how-brexit-saved-britain/In March 2020, with COVID-19 bearing down on Europe, the Guardian published a stark headline: "Brexit means coronavirus vaccine will be slower to reach the UK." The European Union would entice drug makers with its massive market, the news article said, meaning member states would get first dibs on any vaccine.
To make matters worse, the United Kingdom was leaving a European governmental entity that allows for "accelerated assessment" of new drugs. Experts quoted in the article warned that it would be "all but impossible" for Britain to develop its own authorization process before the vaccines were available.
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Thus it was Britain, not the EU, that got first dibs on Pfizer and AstraZeneca: The U.K. negotiated tighter contracts with those companies, catapulting it to the front of the line. And it was Britain, not the EU, that approved AstraZeneca in December, a month before the Europeans. The U.K. has now vaccinated over 50 percent of its population; the EU has vaccinated less than 20 percent.
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No negotiator for the EU had unilateral decision-making power; rather, each of the 27 member states had a voice, which made the negotiations incredibly inefficient. The EU "had to go for the lowest common denominator," the Atlantic Council’s Benjamin Haddad told the Washington Free Beacon, limiting its largesse to what its most risk-averse members would tolerate.
As a result, the EU took much longer than Britain to reach an agreement with AstraZeneca, meaning the company had less time to iron out the logistics of supplying Europe. Negotiators also refused to waive liability for vaccine-makers and sought to minimize prices per dose, which made their final offers considerably less generous than the U.K.’s.
This bureaucratic thriftiness extended to vaccine production. Brussels made few investments in manufacturing capacity and thus had limited leverage in negotiations. The U.K., by contrast, pumped millions of euros into European factories making the AstraZeneca jabs, on the condition that jabs made at those factories be set aside for Britain.
IIRC, there was an old joke to the effect that Oz's duck-billed platypus looked like it had been designed by a committee. Evidently vaccine purchase negotiations carried on by a committee of 27 are worse still.
