Time for a truce in the Vax War with Europe

Can we declare a truce in the vax war with Europe? Last week France was vaccinating 400,000 a day and Germany nearly 700,000. France is bringing on stream two new major dedicated vaccine

production centres, one to produce the Pfizer and one to make the Moderna vaccines.

When fully up and running next month, they will churn out one million doses a day and France hopes to be jabbing a million people a day, including the 300,000 British expats who live in

France. In recent days, France has passed the 10 million mark for vaccinations.

That’s not as good as Britain which is the runaway winner today in the EuroVax contest. But in two or three months, the French will have caught up, as will most other European states. No

wonder Aesop’s fable of the tortoise and the hare is a favourite in France.

The last two months has seen an unseemly war of words between the EU and the UK, with superior pundits and politicians in London denouncing President Macron of France, other European leaders

and the EU Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen. The latter is not only a qualified physician, but an Anglophile, who studied at the London School of Economics.

Late in January, Handelsblatt, the German equivalent of the Financial Times, reported that German health ministry officials had problems with some data from AstraZeneca trials. Today we know

that those doubts existed in the UK, which is why the Government’s Joint Vaccine and Immunisation Committee is recommending the AstraZeneca vaccine not be given to some categories based on

age. But still a procession of professors appeared on TV and radio. The pleasure of jabbing at Europe, and especially the French, seems to be in our DNA.

Britain deserves all the credit for showing how to use the NHS to mobilise for a mass delivery of vaccines. But the European health services — with 16 different health ministries in the

regional governments of Germany and a competing Health Ministry and Health Agency in France, not to mention the continental model of health care, delivered by private insurance firms and

privately owned clinics and hospitals — is utterly different from the centralised NHS.

So the UK fired the first shots in this campaign. But now, like ammunition arriving in sufficient quantities only once a conflict is well under way, we are all getting ourselves vaxed.

Britain should welcome this. In a normal year we take 102 million flights to Europe. From all over small airports in Britain, people jump on a plane to play golf, visit cultural sights, go

to rock and classical music festivals, hold stag and hen parties in the warm sun and enjoy the flowing wine of summertime Europe.

The sooner we are all vaxed, and the sooner we all have vaccination passports agreed jointly with the European Commission for travel purposes, the better. The vax war of words with Europe

has filled many a headline and newspaper page. It is time to declare a truce, get on with vaxing all Europeans, including the Brits, and let us fly again to the Continent, where a warm

welcome awaits.

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