The ugly vaccine nationalism that the World Health Organization and other public health advocates feared is here. And it’s beginning in Europe, the region that usually boasts the world’s greatest levels of equality by many measures.
The spat revolves around the EU’s deal with AstraZeneca, which recently informed the bloc it would not be able to supply the number of vaccines the EU had hoped for by the end of March. EU leaders are furious that the company appears to be fulfilling its deliveries for the UK market and not theirs.
And while the EU’s complaints are largely directed at AstraZeneca, the dispute has triggered animosity on both sides of the Channel, the two sides having only just emerged from four years of bickering over the terms of their Brexit divorce.
On Friday, Brussels imposed controls on vaccine exports to keep track of how many doses were leaving the continent and where they were going, in what leaders called a transparency measure but what looks like a targeted export…