Johnson played a blinder on the EU vaccine spat

A blustering prime minister and a rule-breaking UK government present few problems for the European Commission. It has long experience of dealing with troublemakers on the fringes of Europe. A sweetly reasonable Boris Johnson, however, is a more formidable opponent. He should try making nice more often.
Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is under fire across the continent, especially in her native Germany, for the slow rollout of Europe’s vaccine program. She would have welcomed the distraction of a spat with the Brits this week. But Johnson tried hard not to give her the satisfaction. The first shot in any vaccine war won’t be fired from London.
At first glance it’s hard not to sympathise with Von der Leyen’s complaint that the European Union has exported millions of vaccines to Britain and the rest of the world and received little in return. The vaccine maker AstraZeneca Plc’s continental plants have also hit production problems. Its shots have gone mainly to the UK on a first come, first served basis. The Commission president proposed an export ban.
But if you interrupt global supply chains with border controls, you risk self-harm. Even the Turkish-German BioNTech vaccine championed by Brussels is manufactured by Pfizer Inc, an American pharma company, and it requires 286 materials from 86 suppliers in 19 countries. Fatty nanoparticles vital to its production are sourced from the north of England.
Von der Leyen’s predecessor, Jean-Claude Juncker, once a bete noire of British euroskeptics, has urged the bloc to avoid “a stupid vaccine war,” adding that threats of an export ban could cause “major reputational damage” to the EU. Having taken the moral high ground at the beginning of the epidemic by pooling its resources, Europe is in danger of looking like a protectionist bully. The Commission’s dilatory deals with Big Pharma, not greedy foreigners, created the shortages.
Johnson for once has zipped his lips. Too often London’s negotiations with Brussels are conducted as a zero-sum game. It was about time to try quiet diplomacy. The prime minister made polite personal calls to Germany’s Angela Merkel and France’s Emmanuel Macron before agreeing to a joint EU-UK statement couched in unusually emollient language. Britain and Europe “are all facing the same pandemic and the third wave makes cooperation between the EU and UK even more important,” it read. “Given our interdependencies, we are working to create a win-win situation and expand vaccine supply for all our citizens.”
Johnson’s reward for playing nice was a welcome euro-fudge last week. Although an EU summit endorsed the Commission’s right to stop vaccine exports in theory, in practice it refused to press the button.
This was a quiet but important victory for the prime minister. After months of being pummeled at home for his faltering pandemic leadership, he has his mojo back. His revived popularity in opinion polls is due entirely to the rare success of Britain’s vaccine program. He realizes that any interruption to its rapid rollout endangers his political health too.
The UK is months ahead of laggard continental Europeans in inoculating its citizens and Johnson is taking much of the credit. At Westminster, the opposition Labour Party is lost for a line of attack. Why then jeopardise that success, and the UK economy’s reopening, by renewing hostilities with Europe? By some estimates a ban on vaccine exports could delay British inoculations by two months and cut supplies by 20%. Johnson’s noisy libertarian critics within his Conservative Party want lockdown restrictions lifted immediately.
—Bloomberg