For Jean-Frédéric Poisson, president of the political movement VIA | the way of the people and declared candidate for the 2022 Presidential, Europe’s vaccination strategy is motivated by aims much more political than health.
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By monopolizing the logistics of vaccines against Covid-19, the European Commission has assumed a prerogative traditionally reserved for nation-states, claiming to want to put in place a “centralized European approach”, with the official blessing of Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel, both very quick to want to impose vaccination on populations in record time. However, this strategy has not paid off compared to that of some states like Israel or the United Kingdom which have negotiated their vaccines on their own. Indeed, the European Union has combined delays and incompetence in its way of managing vaccine logistics: the Commission explains this delay by its caution, claiming to want to spare Europeans the setbacks of a defective vaccine. In reality, the delay would be due to a renegotiation of commercial clauses with pharmaceutical laboratories. The Commission was on the verge of signing a contract in which the risks of setting up this messenger RNA vaccine were offset by a laboratory compensation clause. Concretely, in the event of side effects, the laboratories were financially cleared, even legally, of the responsibility for putting the vaccine into circulation. Faced with the outcry caused by the promulgation of this clause, the European Union was forced to renegotiate the contract. She now disguises herself as the mask of virtue and is happy to criticize countries which have signed this clause and thus obtained the vaccine more quickly.
Entangled in the centralizing logic of Brussels, France has had its way to produce vaccines on its soil
The President of the Commission, Ursula Von der Leyen, also explains this delay by the desire to renegotiate vaccines at the lowest price in order to ensure that the weakest countries of the European Union have equity in access to this ” Common good “. In reality, the European Union’s strategy has delayed all the member countries, at least those who wisely waited for it to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies. For their part, Hungary and Austria have bought Russian Sputnik V vaccines, thereby proving that their interests diverged from those of the Commission. France has had the extraordinary opportunity to produce classic vaccines on its soil through the Franco-Austrian laboratory Valneva. Entangled in the logic of European centralization, and although solicited, France did not know how to jump at the opportunity and was beaten by the United Kingdom, “faster to react” according to Franck Grimaud its Director. The British thus had the privilege of acquiring 60 million doses for the fall of 2021 and will be able to taste the fruits of this vaccine from then on, using technology proven since Pasteur. France, it will have to pass its turn and wait until 2022 to obtain the same order.
Thus, the United Kingdom was able to act quickly, in a flexible and pragmatic manner, all the more rapid since it freed itself, through Brexit, from the slowness of the Brussels bureaucracy. The European Union, for its part, got lost in a comprehensive vaccine strategy, ignoring real opportunities and condemning all Member States to wait under false pretexts. She now brandishes the argument for being cautious about the vaccine, but forgets that a vaccine is only truly effective if the entire population receives both doses within a relatively short period of time. Indeed, many scientists find that the vaccine develops curious ineffectiveness in some cases, for example, over 50% of people over the age of 80 do not develop immunity three weeks after the first dose of the vaccine. Worse, variants of the virus now raise fears of the establishment of an annual vaccine that will adapt to new mutations and will surely be the butter of pharmaceutical laboratories.
A primarily political objective
In fine, the incompetence of the Commission on the health issue must not make us forget that the European Union has never ceased to pursue a political goal: it feeds on crises to acquire more sovereignty and advance the idea of a federal Europe. We will therefore not be surprised at the absence of a common sense strategy which would lead, for example, Europe to focus more on the prevention of Covid (vitamins D, zinc, dexamethasone, corticosteroids, etc.), since such prevention would not go in its ideological sense. Its vaccination strategy therefore appears to be motivated much more by political than health goals; Jean Monnet already explained it in the last century: “Europe will be built in crises and it will be the sum of the solutions brought to these crises”.
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