Politics complicates the Covid-19 vaccine rollout

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. Picture: AFP

“AstraZeneca under fire as one of the 17 million recipients gets hit by a bus after second jab.”

This was one of many memes sending up last week’s kneejerk decision by Germany, France, Italy and Spain to halt the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine for five days as a third wave of COVID hit European nations hard.

At the same time, the European Union is preventing exports of AstraZeneca’s vaccine produced in Europe to Australia. Even our Prime Minister’s plea for one million of those contracted euro-doses to be unlocked to help counter the desperate situation in PNG is falling on deaf ears.

The latest developments in vaccine nationalism underline what a great call Australia has made in producing 50 million doses of AstraZeneca vaccine in Melbourne.

They also show something much more sinister: how vaccine soft power is reshaping national security at other levels.

Russia desks around the world are busy.

Last Wednesday ASIO Director-General Mike Burgess revealed that a “nest of spies” operating in Australia was uncovered and removed as the nation was battling COVID last year. Intelligence experts say almost certainly this was a Russian attempt to hack into the Five Eyes intelligence network made up of Britain, Canada, the US, Australia and New Zealand.

Russia itself is reeling from COVID. The Moscow Times is reporting close to 400,000 “excess deaths” in the past year. Yet Russia is now cranking up its own vaccine exports to eastern Europe with its Sputnik V. Vladimir Putin is seizing the strategic opportunity after the huge blunder by Europe on securing vaccines, which left member states desperate to access supply.

Sputnik is the Kremlin’s 2021 soft propaganda tool and it is dividing the West.

Incredibly, even regional state leaders in Germany are lobbying for the Sputnik vaccine, which if approved by the 26 member states would become the first non-Western coronavirus jab used in the block.

Remember Germany is the country that just nursed Russian opposition leader Alexi Navalny back from the brink of death after a poisoning that has been convincingly sheeted back to Putin. Let us not forget the Crimea and MH17. Russia’s behaviour in recent years has rightly led to punitive sanctions.

Russian President Vladimir Putin. Picture: AFP

Hungary has already started to vaccinate its population with 40,000 of a contracted 2 million doses of the Sputnik vaccine. Slovakia and the Czech Republic are following. And EU members Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Latvia and Romania are reportedly awaiting the approval by Europe’s medicines regulator, the EMA.

Great leader that he is, Putin himself has not taken the vaccine. The party line is that he needs to get his flu shots first. On Friday, French leader Emmanuel Macron had his AstraZeneca jab after the EMA found the vaccine was safe and effective and that “the vaccine is not associated with an increase in the overall risk of blood clots”. How much Macron’s jab can do to offset the damage he has done by France pausing the rollout last week amid headlines on blood clots is unclear.

AstraZeneca is a British-Swedish company and its COVID vaccine was created in an Oxford laboratory. The company is distributing more doses than any pharmaceutical giant worldwide, including in the developing world. And unlike others, it is doing it without making a profit.

Sadly, the treatment of AstraZeneca by Brussels has as much to do with its anger at Britain over Brexit as it does over delays in the anticipated production levels at European factories.

In late January, Brussels went for the nuclear option, announcing there would be a hard border on the island of Ireland to prevent vaccine imports reaching the UK from the EU, a decision made without consultation with Ireland or Britain. The move, which was quickly reversed, is something that EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen says she deeply regrets.

On Saturday, von der Leyen again upped the ante by threatening to ban all exports of European-manufactured AstraZeneca vaccine from Europe. “That’s the message to AstraZeneca: you fulfil your contract with Europe first before you start supplying to other countries,” she told Germany’s Funke newspaper group.

Just how the legal battles will determine the rights and wrongs of AstraZeneca’s committed contracts with the British government and what the company has described as more “best efforts” pledges in contracts to supply Europe remains to be seen. There is little doubt the EU’s inability to agree on a common strategy for selecting vaccines and locking in deals contributed to months of delay. It is arguably the most powerful demonstration of why people voted for Brexit.

After this, would any multinational pharmaceutical jump to build a factory in Europe again? In British papers there are reports of large capital flows shifting out of Europe and into Britain, a country which experienced a far deeper economic dip but is recovering faster. Fifty per cent of the British population have now had a first dose of COVID vaccine.

Britain has its own bitter recent experience with Russia, also involving poisons. The Five Eyes member will be disturbed by the Kremlin’s exercise of soft power as Europe opens the door to the east. Peer-reviewed data published in The Lancet has already shown the Russian vaccine to have a 91.6 per cent efficacy, although there are still concerns about the soundness of its manufacturing.

The most powerful Five Eyes member, the US, had its own run-in with Russia last week. Asked if he thought Putin was a killer, President Biden replied: “I do.” “It takes one to know one,” Putin reportedly fired back.

Unfortunately for the US Commander in Chief, it was his subsequent triple stumble up the steps into Air Force One which grabbed the headlines.

The memes followed. One had a picture of White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki with the words: “We inherited broken stairs from the previous administration.”