As expected, EU leaders’ virtual summit on Thursday was dominated by a row over Covid-19 vaccine supplies, but contrary to some predictions the clash was not about an export ban.
A certain vaccine nationalism was clearly manifest in an insistence by Austria's veto-wielding prime minister Sebastian Kurz that his country should receive a greater allocation of emergency supplies despite being ahead of poorer eastern EU states in its vaccination programme. Deadlocked, leaders kicked the issue back to ambassadors to resolve.
The heat had been taken out of the separate export ban row, and its potential for a vaccine war with consequent threats to international vaccine component supply chains, by a pre-summit agreement between Brussels and London pledging they would seek to work together to keep supply chains open. At the summit, leaders backed proposals that would see exports controlled only if there was an absence of reciprocation from the destination state – that it was refusing to supply the EU – or if the state in question was well ahead of average EU vaccination rates.
The argument with London was always a political sideshow to the real bone of contention: AstraZeneca's inability to honour its contracts with both parties. It was a phoney war played up by a Brexit-obsessed Boris Johnson to capitalise on the UK's relative vaccination success by exposing the supposed incompetence of the EU. In reality, although the UK has not exported a single vaccine to the EU, the latter has exported 77 million vaccines, 21 million of them to the UK. The union circulated 88 million doses to its own population.
AstraZeneca – which now aims to deliver just 100 million doses by June instead of a promised 300 million – has slowed vaccine rollouts throughout the EU. Meanwhile many EU states are struggling to contain new cases of the virus, with Belgium and France being forced into fresh lockdown measures this week.
While Ireland had been concerned that outright export bans might lead to retaliation, Taoiseach Micheál Martin argued after the summit that “in the context of companies that fail to fulfil their contracts with the EU, the leverage has to be there to ensure their contracts are fulfilled, but also that the EU can have certain safety nets in respect of making sure it has sufficient vaccines for its own population”.
The unresolved argument with Austria over allocating extra supplies had all the hallmarks of last year's prolonged budget row between the union's net contributors and net recipients – unanimity voting on spending programmes makes expressing financial or other solidarity with weaker member states politically challenging and decision-making, as the UK points out, cumbersome. The solution is even more politically difficult.