Sir Nick Clegg says EU has ‘let millions of Europeans down’ in vaccine rollout
Sir Nick Clegg has hit out at the EU for letting “millions of Europeans down” in its slow rollout of the Covid vaccines.
The Facebook Vice President, and staunch remainer, said “something has gone badly wrong” in the bloc’s handling of the rollout and that “across the EU people are waiting for their vaccines impatiently”.
Vaccine rollouts have been slow across the continent, with countries like France, Germany and Spain only administering doses to around 20 per cent of their populations so far.
The UK, meanwhile, has given at least one jab to about 55 per cent of its population.
Speaking to LBC, Clegg said: “I think the EU has let itself down and more importantly it’s let millions of Europeans down by not providing people with vaccines on the scale and on the speed that has been possible in the UK and that has led to quite understandably a lot of anger.
“They see where I’m now living in the US, in the UK and Israel and other countries vaccines are being rolled out much more rapidly. I hope they catch up, because candidly Covid anywhere is Covid everywhere, so we all have an interest for everyone to get access to vaccines more rapidly, but clearly something has gone very badly wrong indeed in recent months in the EU.”
It comes as a poll by JL Partners/Bloomberg yesterday showed that two-in-three Britons think Brexit helped the UK’s vaccine rollout and that support for leaving the EU has risen in the wake of a row over vaccines.
The EU has levelled a number of threats to block shipments of vaccines to the UK this year, with many pundits accusing the bloc’s leaders of vaccine nationalism.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen first made the threat in January as the bloc’s vaccine rollout faced early supply problems.
It led to a quickly reversed decision by the EU to breach the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement, which was met by outrage across the globe.
Just last month, the EU once again threatened to block vaccines as it was angry that AstraZeneca/Oxford University jabs being produced in the Netherlands were due to be sent to the UK.
When asked about the reasons for the EU’s slow rollout, Clegg said: “I suspect it’s a combination of the governments not placing some big bets by pre-buying, at that point, untested vaccines as had been the case in the UK and the US.
“I think it’s also this age old division of labour between the European Commission in Brussels which was doing some of the negotiations and the member states responsible for actually distributing them and clearly something got lost in translation.”