Anyone for tennis? How the EC vaccine cock-up will cost Ireland billions

It isn’t so much the success of the vaccine rollout as the financial and political gamble taken relatively early last year to pre-order vast quantities of different vaccines which hadn’t even been approved.

Johnson decided to back nearly every horse in the race.

The British government pre-ordered 300m doses of six different vaccine candidates. So much how will it all cost? It doesn’t actually matter. Not quibbling over price has given Boris Johnson a genuine second chance as prime minister (a rare thing) and will enable the British economy to open up more quickly.

While the UK had among the highest number of coronavirus deaths in Europe and the government’s handling of the pandemic was at first cavalier and later complacent, so much has turned around now.

A shopping list of vaccine prices leaked by a Belgian minister before Christmas shows the Belgians are paying per vaccine dose: €1.78 for Astra Zeneca; €7.14 for Johnson & Johnson; €7.56 for Sanofi/GSK; €12 for Pfizer; €10 for CureVac; €15.12 for Moderna.

These are EU rates and will vary for other countries like the US and UK who put state money into various vaccines. But what would the UK’s bill be at those prices?

The UK moved quickly to pre-order 40m does of Pfizer (and became the first country in the world to grant it regulatory approval - €480m). It has ordered 30m doses of Johnson & Johnson (€21.3m). It has pre-ordered 60m Novavax and 120m vaccines from Sanofi-GSK.

When put against the continued exchequer and economic cost of lockdowns, the sums involved are insignificant. Nobody in Britain, the EU or Ireland either, is asking how much we are spending on vaccines. The only question is when are we getting them?

Let’s say Britain’s vaccine bill was €5bn. Compare that to the €52bn in state-backed business loans it has given out.

Boris Johnson used his political guile and desperation, given how badly wrong things were going, to throw money at the vaccine issue. And it has paid off.

Politicians with their backs to the wall can be desperate and dangerous, but sometimes lucky too.

Contrast this with the approach taken by the European Commission (EC). The EC is a necessary administrator which applies a detailed bureaucratic approach to everything.

Once it took over the negotiation of bulk vaccine purchases, pre-orders secured by Germany, Italy and France, were handed over to the bureaucrats.

Since then everything has gone wrong: the fights with Astra Zeneca; the threat to apply a border on the island of Ireland and all of the vaccine nationalism.

Now comes the ultimate cock-up as it emerged over the weekend that Astra Zeneca has a plant in the Netherlands designed for vaccine manufacture that has yet to get regulatory approval to open.

The difference in approach between the politicians in charge in London and the bureaucracy in charge in Brussels is staggering.

A British government spokesman said last year vaccine prices were secured on a case-by-case basis, and assessed “to ensure value for money, while giving the UK the best chance of rapidly obtaining and deploying a safe and effective vaccine”.

The EC had an early opportunity last year to acquire and additional 100m Pfizer doses but turned it down. Last July it was reported that the EC vaccine plan had yet to complete its first deal, despite holding weeks of talks with Johnson & Johnson of the US.

By now the British government has secured a total of 357 million vaccine doses from seven companies.

In Ireland we can only look on. Consolidating the vaccine programme within the EC made sense for us. As a small country, we were able to participate in a bigger bulk purchasing programme with guarantees of a pro-rata share based on our population size.

If we had gone it alone, would we have taken the financial risk or had the foresight to order 26m vaccine doses. This is the equivalent figure to what the British have done.

Whatever the cost of pre-order vaccines, it pales into insignificance compared to the cost of extended Level 5 lockdowns. Anything that gets us out of lockdown, responsibly, is worth the money.

A six week Level 5 lockdown costs the Irish exchequer €1.5bn in direct costs. The three employee and business programmes, PUP, CRSS and EWSS cost around €200m per week.

Vat receipts were down €2.6bn in the first 11 months of last year.

There is no doubt that dangerous variants of the virus which could render existing vaccines redundant remain a real danger which could result in future lockdowns. This could be true of the UK as anywhere else.

But the complete bungling of the vaccine programme by the EC, largely due to taking a bureaucratic approach rather than a pragmatic and expedient one, has done enormous damage to the EU.

All of this guff in the British press about it making Brexit worthwhile, doesn’t stack up to long term scrutiny. But politically, it is an enormous coup for Johnson’s government.

The EC blew it. Next time could be a free-for-all and Ireland could do even worse.