Vaccine wars warm up

This has been fascinating overall. I have focused on Graui coverage, but the anti-EU press has had a field day. 

Background stories include these:

The leaders of Britain’s five largest business groups have warned the government that firms face “substantial difficulties” at UK ports since Brexit, with the prospect of a “significant loss of business” if the situation is allowed to continue.

And this one

An inaugural meeting between the UK’s new head of mission to Brussels and senior EU officials in Brussels has been “postponed” in response to the status of the bloc’s ambassador in London being downgraded....The introductory meeting has been “postponed for the time being” by the EU, in what sources said was a tit-for-tat move over a long-running dispute.

Tit for tat politics? Hostility towards the UK? Surely not so from our cosmopolitan European friends? Incompetence from the UK Government and pettiness by Boris surely? But then this

Millions of doses of coronavirus vaccine could be blocked from entering Britain from the EU within days after Brussels said it had to respond to shortages emerging in member states.

The European federation of pharmaceutical industries and associations warned that the commission plan could lead to a breakdown of global supply of vaccines. “Global supply chains are key to delivering vaccines to protect citizens … Risking retaliatory measures from other regions at this crucial moment in the fight against Covid-19 is not in anyone’s best interest,” the industry group said.

The 27 EU member states were devastated by the announcement last week by the Anglo-Swedish pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca that it would only be able to deliver 25% of the 100m doses expected by the end of March, citing production problems in its Belgian plant...The company’s assurances to the UK government that it would fulfil its order of 2m doses a day without delay further fuelled the anger felt by officials involved in the EU’s faltering programme. Just 2% of the EU adult population has received a vaccine jab, compared with 11% of those in the UK, with scant sign of the bloc’s vaccination drive gaining momentum.

Peter Liese, a German MEP in Angela Merkel’s CDU party, said: “If the only solution is to have a reduction of the delivery to the UK, and that would bring more vaccine to the EU, that is only fair.”

Things were to get much sharper...