The government was having unusual and conspicuous success with its vaccination programme…actually hitting its targets which it was approaching with tremendous gusto.
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The much respected Jonathan Van-Tam ( Chief Medical Officer for England ) declared that the more dangerous potentially vaccine evading South African variant may not be too much of a problem as it’s prevalence was likely to be constrained by the much faster spread of our very transmissible Kent variant.
In an effort to deflect domestic criticism Ursula von der Leyden scored a spectacular own goal by invoking Article 16 to prevent the export of vaccine out of the EU to the UK thereby jeopardising the Irish peace process for which the EU had claimed prime importance in the years of Brexit negotiations. She was forced to backtrack in the face of universal criticism but the affair had exposed bureaucratic flaws in the EU project which many were happy to see.
The news that the EU would suffer a shortage of vaccine while the UK would be well supplied partly from production in the EU prompted the the President of the European Commission to propose banning exports to the UK even though the UK had secured supplies by moving fast and committing early while the EU had hardly got started.
To deflect criticism from their people for vaccine shortages the EU began to lash out elsewhere and particularly at the UK who for once in the pandemic had been conspicuously successful. President Macron defended the EU approach by saying that going slower was safer and amazingly insinuated that the Pfizer vaccine was not safe for the over 65’s who at that very moment were receiving jabs in the UK.