8830

Begun the Vaccine War has.

8831

Sovereignty cuts both ways.

8832

The Article 16 is apparently being walked back, but I would expect difficulties going forward, at the end of the day people are dying and if people remember the start of Covid in Europe countries very quickly moved to ensure stuff for their population, and their population only.

With things going badly I would expect more of that attitude to come back.

8833

The whole article 16 thing looks like a fantastic dead cat (although suspect it was just incompetence from the office of a commissioner with minimal experience managing large orgs)) to distract from the export ban (assuming authorizations are not granted) which in a way is much more odious.

Vaccine manufacturers have been consistently upfront that if you want early production you either have to pay well over the odds or directly fund research and manufacturing. The EU have been reluctant to do the first and trail far behind the US and UK in the second on a per capita basis - and the funding for manufacturing they did deliver was much later.

I do wonder what the endgame is here. I see 4 options:

  1. Block all exports. Alienates UK, Canada, Australia. Will certainly face a WTO case due to allowing exports to Norway, Israel. Probably a breach of international law. Huge impact on EU soft power.
  2. Block all exports to the UK. Will certainly face a WTO case. Definately a breach of international law (unjustified discrimination between countries). Will basically destroy the reputation of the EU in the UK for a generation.
  3. Just block the remaining trickle of exports from the initial NL production line for the AZ vaccine. Won’t appreciably impact the number of doses available in UK, let alone the EU, but could be used by commission as evidence of some kind of achievement of “stopping AZ diverting doses” (whatever the reality of the funding and contracts for that production line). Will alienate the UK and contract pharma manufacturers in the EU, but wider reputational damage can probably be contained. UK might try and arrange for those doses to be delivered to and used in NI to force the EU to invoke A16 if they want to stop them.
  4. Not actually block any exports. Least impact on EU’s international reputation, but commission might be seen internally to have failed again.
8834

I expect negotiations and deals until the news are no longer “The EU is failing hard on vaccines unlike the UK and look at all these vaccines we are exporting to them instead of using in the EU”.

This is assuming things don’t go properly pear shaped, in which case I have no idea.

8835

Why would AZ work with the UK to do that? They would gain nothing, antagonize the EU, and make it look to the public like there really is something dodgy going on.

8836

Ah, so you are saying the EU would inflict consequences on a company for doing something entirely legal in order to fulfil their contractual obligations.

Why is delivering doses to northern ireland more problematic than delivering them to, say, Algeria? NI is effectively part of the customs union, and this is a customs matter. Without an A16 invocation there are no grounds to prevent vaccines manufactured in the EU being delivered there, as long as they are not exported outside the EU.

(sorry for the edits, establishing exactly what is going on with vaccine doses is… hard. We really don’t know much about the original Halix contract that is behind the AZ exports from the EU)

8837

I am commenting purely on the part I quoted, not on the legality / morality on restrictions on vaccine exports. You’ve come up with this bizarre scenario of AZ and the UK conspiring into forcing the EU into triggering A16 just to embarrass the EU over NI matters, by arranging for some symbolic export of vaccines.

One can imagine why Boris would like that just for the cheap political win that’ll play well at home. But it is hard to see what AZs interest would be in doing that. They just want this to die down and go back to the business, not to fan the flames.

(Or are you claiming that AZ is under contractual obligation to give the UK priority on vaccines produced elsewhere in the world? I don’t believe that is the case.)

8838

I suspect the output of the initial production line is reserved to the UK - the contract was originally with Vaccitech not AZ and may well have very different terms to the other EU production lines, which were only set up much much later when the EU finally made the advance payment. (These production lines are huge, which is why the EU keeps throwing around the >300m euros figure, but what they don’t mention is when this was paid out).

This is about the UK getting the doses it paid for from the production line it paid to have set up. It’s not about cheap political wins or embarassing the EU. Those are just possible results for the EU if it persists.

8839

That’s obviously not the case, given the decision to import rather than rely purely on vaccines manufactured in the UK only happened in early December.

8840

It’s entirely possible to have a right of first refusal which you do not expect to have to exercise. Given the initial production plans for the UK factories (which, like the EU ones, took about 3 months more than planned to get working at a reasonable capacity) this seems entirely plausible in this case. The UK are on record as being careful with their contracts to ensure right of first refusal on the output of capacity in which they invested.

8841

UK in a Changing Europe has been compiling interviews from key players involved in the Brexit process as part of a historical archive.

https://ukandeu.ac.uk/brexit-witness-archive/

8842

Parts of the the Philip Hammon interview are extraordinary:

By the way, you asked me earlier on, at the time of accepting the role as
Chancellor, did I have a clear idea of the Prime Minister’s view? I didn’t say
this, but I’ve just remembered this. When I sat in the Cabinet Room on that
evening – and the only other person in the room was Fiona Hill – I did ask her
about Brexit, and she said to me, ‘Brexit means Brexit.’ That was it. That was
the only discussion we had about it.
Look, what happened, I was completely stunned by the speech that she made
at the Conservative Party Conference in October 2016. I hadn’t seen the
relevant part of it in advance. I’d had no input to the speech. Nick Timothy kept
me completely away from it. I did see some text on the economy the day
before, but I had no idea that she was going to describe Brexit in the hardest
possible terms.
I was absolutely horrified by what I was hearing. All I remember thinking was,
‘There will be a television camera that will be on your face. If you move a
muscle, it will be the story on the front page of every newspaper tomorrow.’ I
remember I wasn’t even really listening to her. I was just sitting there.

8843
8844

I’m sure COVID plays a role in that but that still sounds quite bad.

8845

Maybe, but just a little bit I think.
Right now they have 10.000 custom officials needed for the export paperwork. They need 50.000. And this is before UK starts import checks in July.

Well at least the UK government creates new jobs…

8846

Perhaps to some extent, but direct-to-consumer commerce to (and from) the EU (i.e. pretty much all internet based commerce) is now just… gone.

For some bizarre reason people generally don’t like paying an additional 20-30% (or whatever) on the price of something as import taxes just because it came to/from the EU.

Who could possibly have imagined something like this would have happened.

In my opinion blaming it on COVID is totally disingenuous as the drop would have happened over the entirety of 2020. And it hasn’t. It’s happened almost entirely since the start of 2021.

Edit: I suppose, in fairness, that I should point out that the real problem here isn’t so much that trade to the EU has died off, it’s more that the ‘slack’ hasn’t been picked up by the much-touted international trade market. The same one that business could always have traded with regardless of the UK’s status with the EU. Again, who could’ve seen etc etc.

8847

Yeah, I don’t buy the narrative and especially not from The Guardian. They are the opposite side of the coin to the Telegraph and essentially just spew anti-Brexit propaganda. It’s far too early to get a good measure on levels of trade. We’re what, a month in… remind me in a year when we have access to some proper data.

EDIT: Just punctuation

8848

Well, I suspect you’re plumb out of narrative-buying cash, aren’t you?

8849

The problem with the pro-brexit narrative is that, thanks to the sheer incompetence of the government in getting their oven-ready deal done in a timely manner, absolutely nobody in the import/export industry really knew what was going to happen with Brexit until pretty much after it happened (and to some scopes & extents, still don’t).

Regardless of how anyone feels about Brexit one way or the other, it’s a total clusterfuck in execution. We had a one year ‘transition’ period where absolutely nothing of consequence was done to actually transition or even begin to prepare for transitioning. We’re now paying the price for that during what is already the most economically unique and fragile times of my generation (and, given my generation is ‘millennial’, that really says something).

Of course, I’m sure the highly benevolent nature of international capitalism will usher in a new dawn of prosperity off the back of our rotting fish industry (and others). Nothing brings the customers quite like being utterly desperate to sell.