The race for vaccination across Europe and the world is as tragicomic as Aesop’s Fables.
Journalists and opposition parties across all countries are quick to criticise their governments for not having enough vaccines or for being too slow in distributing and inoculating their populations. It seems that it is all a matter of running faster than your neighbour and not a strategic plan to ensure that not only your own population but that all populations get vaccinated in an orderly fashion so that freedom of movement and trade can resume.
Since we are as weak as the weakest link, it does not matter whether one is a hare or a tortoise because we are all dependent on the speed of the tortoise to reach global or, at least, continental herd immunity.
In Europe, we hear a lot of criticism that because the EU plans to move at a joint common pace to get all its people vaccinated by the end of summer or autumn 2021, while non-EU members have got off to a faster start, we are all suffering. This is not the case at all.
First of all, running to take vaccines that have not yet passed all the safety testing procedures is utterly risky. We all remember the thalidomide affair when a speedy clearance of a medicine resulted in a multitude of damaged foetuses and handicapped children being born. Accepting the Chinese and Sputnik V vaccines by Hungary and the quick clearance of the Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna vaccines by the UK were risky, to say the least. Governments were placing their population as guinea pigs for the sake of making a political point and hitting the headlines to get a higher percentage score than their neighbours.
Vaccinating only your own population does not protect any one country since travel, trade and contacts with others and the possibility of variants will remain as long as not everyone is vaccinated and new cases fall to zero or close thereto. The EU has had a deeper, longer and more thorough testing of each and every vaccine and this was done to safeguard us all against a possible thalidomide repetition.
Another reason for delays was that vaccine makers were asking to transfer to the EU and other countries all responsibility for any damages that could be caused by their vaccines to the vaccinated in future. (Countries and the EU have not only funded the research but also pre-paid for deliveries.) If the US and the UK accepted to cover any such risks, the EU did not. This lengthened negotiations and delayed the early, quick and irresponsible signing.
Why should vaccine makers who are guaranteed profits in the billions of euros also sign away their civil or criminal responsibility for any faulty or dangerous vaccines? Like all pharmaceutical companies producing medicines or vaccines, the risks lie with the makers. That is why we have lengthy blind tests and three phases of testing and peer reviews of the findings before medicines and vaccines are permitted.
Vaccine makers were asking to transfer to the EU and other countries all responsibility for any damages that could be caused by their vaccines- John Vassallo
The risk for damages lies with the companies themselves. It seems the UK got off to a quick start because they did not insist on this point. It may come to haunt the government in the future. Once again, the hare and the tortoise.
Moreover, once the methodical vaccination process starts and factory production problems are overcome, we will see a surge of steady percentages of all Europeans being vaccinated and, then, by autumn, we may all be brought together in our single market and Schengen free movement with a reopened economy.
Another example of a fast start has been Israel but here the statistics are false because the Palestinian population of Israel and of the controlled occupied areas have been excluded on racist grounds to favour only the Jewish population and, thus, the statistical percentage is wrong. While many countries in the richer part of the world have been criticised for hoarding vaccines to the detriment of poorer countries, selecting sections of the population to vaccinate basing oneself upon race or religion is probably worse.
How about Malta? We are doing extremely well even within the EU bubble since, although we receive proportionately the same amount of vaccines like all other EU countries and the safest vaccines in the world thanks to the Medicines Agency in Amsterdam, we have proven to be better at distributing and actually inoculating our priority section of the population than any other EU member state. Well done to our nurses, doctors and inoculation centres for sterling work.
Yet, as long as the airport is open and not all people coming in are tested we are all still at risk of importing variants that do not respond to the vaccines available.
I am glad to be a European, a member of the EU, since I know that the vaccine that will be available to be given to me when my turn arrives is safe and that, by autumn, all my other EU brother and sister citizens will simultaneously be made safe.
There is one question that nags me and that is what happens to the people who are at present in Malta temporarily, like long-term tourists spending winter here but who are not residents and the illegal workers who may be in Malta but not registered as residents or immigrants? And what about those Maltese who are for some reason or another in another EU country?
Do all these need to travel back to their home countries to be vaccinated or is there some form of reciprocity between EU countries? And if we have non-EU citizens like Serbians, Albanians, Libyans, Americans or Turks in Malta do these also get called for vaccination according to age groups and risk factors or do they have to wait until all Maltese residents are done and then hope for any surplus?
These questions need also to be answered in order for all to be safe. The tortoises dominate, not the hares.
John Vassallo is an ex ambassador to the EU.