Ursula von der Leyen accidentally made the case for Brexit while apologising to Europe for the slow pace of her vaccine roll-out today – admitting that solo countries will be quicker at getting things done.
Attempting to justify why the EU signed deals for Covid vaccines weeks or months after the UK, she said on Friday that countries acting alone are ‘like a speedboat’ while the EU ‘is more of a tanker.’
After a week which saw von der Leyen threaten drug-maker AstraZeneca over deliveries of its jab, she was also forced to admit ‘underestimating’ problems in how the vaccines would be produced and rolled out.
Von der Leyen also said she ‘regretted’ threatening to block vaccine exports to Britain by imposing a hard border in Ireland, saying: ‘We shouldn’t even have thought about [it]’.
Ursula von der Leyen accidentally made the argument for Brexit as she apologised for the EU’s slow vaccine roll-out today, admitting solo countries will be faster at getting things done
The UK has far outpaced EU countries with its vaccine roll-out, which has seen 14 per cent of the total population jabbed compared to just over 2 per cent on average in Europe
The 64-year-old also conceded that she had made a mistake when promising that 70 per cent of Europeans would be vaccinated by the end of summer, a target that now looks all-but impossible to achieve.
Speaking to Suddeutsche Zeitung and other European outlets in a group interview published Friday, she addded: ‘We should have explained that things are moving forward, but slowly, and that there will be problems and delays with these completely new procedures.’
But she continued to insist that having the EU negotiate on behalf of the 27-member bloc was still the right thing to do.
‘I can’t even imagine what it would have meant for Europe, in terms of unity, if one or more Member States had access to vaccines and not the others,’ she said.
Europe’s vaccine roll-out has been plagued by delays and delivery problems that…
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