European capitals are finally getting ready to give away their coronavirus vaccines. But they want to make sure they get back as good as they give.
Within a matter of months, supply of vaccines around the EU is set to outstrip demand. It’s a sudden reversal from the halting vaccinations and uneven delivery schedules of the past few months. That means “Team Europe” is set to start diverting doses to less fortunate countries.
But capitals are feeling humiliated that Russia, China and India seemed to have taken all the credit for supplying vaccines — while Europe is vilified for reserving twice as many doses as needed to immunize the whole bloc. And Wednesday’s announcement that the Biden administration will back waivers of intellectual property protections for vaccines only amplifies pressure on the EU, which loudly called for vaccines to be a “public good” last year in an implicit rebuke of Donald Trump’s America First approach.
So now, European capitals are eyeing ways to maximize their vaccine diplomacy by sending doses to strategically important places.
Some are still open to working with COVAX, just as long as the global distribution initiative works with them to help the EU fulfill its geopolitical goals while giving unneeded doses to countries in need. French President Emmanuel Macron and Commission President Ursula von der Leyen helped launch COVAX, and the EU was the initiative’s biggest financial contributor until Joe Biden entered the White House and pledged $4 billion from the U.S.
However, the World Health Organization-backed mechanism has been diminished by rich countries’ market dominance — and now faces a choice between accommodating Europe or sliding into irrelevance.
“The goalposts are kind of shifting,” said Gian Gandhi, a UNICEF official who is coordinating vaccine deliveries for COVAX. It has to adjust to the reality that rich countries are putting domestic herd immunity before global equity, he noted.
The grand strategy behind COVAX was to buy vaccines for everyone, rich and poor, and dole out the global supply evenly. That approach aimed to ensure everyone could vaccinate 20 percent of their population, even in places too poor to buy jabs — or too geopolitically insignificant to be offered jabs through vaccine diplomacy.
The problem: While European countries offered COVAX money from the get-go, they left little for the international mechanism to spend it on, reserving much of the initial global supply of experimental jabs. More recently, COVAX has been reeling from the massive drop-off in expected supply from Indian vaccine producers as that country faces its spiraling COVID-19 crisis.
So now, COVAX is more open to taking what it can get. It has agreed with France to send jabs to Africa, and is working with Spain to donate jabs to Latin America this summer.
“We asked to have visibility,” said an adviser to Macron. “We feel accountable to our citizens to account for where the vaccines go.”
Countries also say they need to see more consistent deliveries before they commit a set share of their doses to the mechanism — and have more control over where they go, according to diplomats.
COVAX is also agreeing to accept smaller donations, despite the extra logistical hassles. “Speed and timing of donations, even small ones, is more important, because of the supply disruptions,” said Gandhi.
The EU always pledged to give away its extras. But now that vaccination campaigns are finally making enough progress, Europe’s status is faltering on the international scene compared with countries that prioritized exports over their own populations. It’s mindful that India, for example, had been churning out doses for COVAX until recently, while rivals Russia and China are filling in production gaps in Europe’s Balkan backyard with their vaccines.
The Commission has started laying all these facts out in lurid detail for capitals, producing color-coded maps to track the destinations of vaccines from rival producers. In addition, the EU has made much of the fact that it’s also a major exporter of jabs, letting over 200 million doses leave the Continent destined for at least 44 countries rich and poor. That’s “as much as have been delivered to Europeans,” von der Leyen tweeted Thursday.
Yet Europe isn’t getting any do-gooder credit for all these deliveries. And now, with the supply side looking brighter, EU capitals are determined not to repeat the mistake when it comes to donations.
“You can clearly see that the COVAX Facility did not turn out as appreciated as intended,” said one EU health attaché, urging the Commission to develop its own mechanism for sharing doses.
With vaccines to spare, the looming question for EU capitals is whether to channel them through COVAX, ideally maximizing the impact and ensuring equity, or go their own way on donations in hopes of getting more credit for their largesse.
Famine to feast
In contrast to the early months of the vaccine rollout, European leaders are about to face a completely different type of problem: excess doses.
“We reached a situation nationally where we have more doses than we can use,” said Per Olsson Fridh, Sweden’s minister for international development, in an interview. His country is so well supplied it announced Monday it would donate a million doses of the Oxford/AstraZeneca shot. Finland, likewise, has put its orders of that jab on hold, a health ministry official said in an email.
Meanwhile, Denmark explicitly stopped using the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines following concerns about links to rare but serious blood clots. While it’s donated some to Germany, Copenhagen still hasn’t decided what to do with the rest of its unused doses. Those already delivered are set to expire over the next two months, complicating their potential to be used elsewhere in time.
As other countries find themselves with extra jabs, they’ll be eager to donate “just to get them off their chest,” the health attaché said. “They’re just costing money if you leave them in the fridge.”
More broadly, one of the main dilemmas for EU capitals is whether COVAX is the right mechanism, or whether it’s preferable to go their own way. Recent history suggests that the EU’s first impulse hasn’t been to share doses through COVAX.
For example, France circulated a plan late last year proposing that countries start donating vaccines immediately, with the goal of giving 5 percent of total allocations. The idea, according to the document, was to actually get out ahead of COVAX by donating directly — with supplies labeled as “Team Europe” — while still respecting the international effort’s allocation mechanism. But the plan was a nonstarter amid concerns in Germany and across the bloc that the EU was falling short on securing doses for its own citizens.
Then, the Commission promised in January it would pick up the idea of an EU-wide vaccine-sharing mechanism, which would operate “until COVAX is able to deliver poor countries with large quantities of vaccines,” von der Leyen said at the time. This was developed in a Commission draft paper in March, seen by POLITICO, which reiterated the idea that COVAX was Priority A, but also laid out ideas for a separate EU mechanism.
That draft also makes clear that the Commission was already keen for good publicity on vaccines, promising that a “Team Europe” approach “respects EU and EU Member States’ competencies and ensures visibility” and its “branding includes national flags together with the European flag.”
The Commission envisioned that this mechanism would let countries target their donations to certain countries or regions that would “underline Member States ownership of the vaccines.” In a “purely illustrative example,” one country could coordinate donations to the Western Balkans, another to Latin America and Asia and another to Africa. This approach “would allow to support Member States and the EU in their diplomatic efforts, avoid duplications and promote the Team Europe in those regions,” the Commission wrote.
Yet Brussels-directed transfers posed their own problems, EU diplomats said — namely, that old bugaboo of legal responsibility. The early Commission vaccine contracts didn’t detail what would happen to their carefully crafted liability provisions if EU doses were donated or resold to other countries.
COVAX hesitancy
Amid this impasse, Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, gave a presentation to EU countries on March 15 to convince the EU to donate doses via COVAX rather than via its own separate mechanism.
In part, Gavi pitched COVAX as the simplest solution: Donations to COVAX would reduce transaction costs, and the liability and indemnity would already be worked out. Gavi even offered its communications team to provide support for countries “to gain recognition for dose sharing,” according to Gavi’s presentation slides seen by POLITICO.
But one of the major hurdles also brought up at meeting is that most of the doses that EU countries are willing to donate are ones that they already have, according to a second EU diplomat. COVAX has been reluctant to accept pre-delivered jabs out of concern they may not have been stored properly. Liability questions also become more muddy in these cases.
Distrust of COVAX itself remains a factor: Diplomats interviewed for this article often made vague references to its failings in negotiations with pharmaceutical companies, or to supply problems — not necessarily acknowledging that Europe’s advance purchase agreements contributed to COVAX’s shortcomings.
And then there’s the need to play vaccine defense against Russia and China, whose global deliveries amount to “propaganda,” one senior EU diplomat said, adding that the “best response” is to focus on the bloc’s backyard.
“The EU is not safe until the EU neighborhoods are safe, and fast vaccination of the Western Balkans and of the Eastern Partnership [countries] is the way to secure the safety,” the diplomat added.
Donations trickle out
As domestic deliveries of mRNA jabs intensify, the EU and its member countries are wading in with initial donations to selected countries, with and without COVAX.
With little fanfare, Romania donated nearly 305,000 doses to neighboring Moldova on a bilateral basis since February, and will start selling the country up to 200,000 doses each month. And in April, the EU finalized plans to send 650,000 doses to the Western Balkans, after four months of negotiations over liability — and well after Russia and China (and COVAX) supplied shots.
For his part, Macron publicly pushed in February the idea of diverting 5 percent of vaccines to Africa as a way to counter Moscow and Beijing — without mentioning COVAX. Yet he opted to work through the mechanism, formally pledging some 500,000 doses in April, with the first 100,000 going to Mauritania. That made France the first G7 country to deliver this way.
Ultimately, Paris wants to see Brussels create an EU-level system for donating to COVAX. “That of course gives more visibility to Europe, and that allows us to simplify these donations to COVAX,” the Macron adviser said.
Paris’ deal with COVAX, which involved negotiations not just about transferring supply but also about liability, is a “proof of concept” that such deals can be done, UNICEF’s Gandhi said.
“France is a country that is still ramping up their own national vaccination, and they took the lead in showing that they should donate doses,” he added, urging other rich countries to see it as a “standard.”
One EU diplomat had a less rosy take, noting that it was only a couple of months ago that France told other countries it was more important to communicate donating doses than to actually do anything yet.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, meanwhile, set his own benchmark last month, announcing that when 50 percent of Spanish adults are vaccinated, Madrid will send 5 to 10 percent of its doses to Latin America.
Missing leaders
Then there’s Germany, which is second only to the U.S. in giving cash for COVAX. But rather than taking a lead on donating doses, Berlin has joined the majority of other EU countries in taking a back seat and waiting until they have sufficient supplies before donating.
The German government is willing to share vaccine doses, “especially via COVAX,” said a health ministry spokesperson in a statement — that is, “provided of course that our citizens have already been sufficiently supplied.”
There’s also private grumbling that lack of vocal leadership from the Council is making it hard to convince national leaders to pitch in doses. Neither Council President Charles Michel nor Portugal, which holds the rotating Council presidency, have pushed for donation benchmarks.
Stockholm, meanwhile, initially stood out for staying above the vaccine-diplomacy fray. Its COVAX donation of 1 million doses in the second quarter doesn’t come with any strings attached, said Olsson Fridh, its development minister. He also said he understood concerns about Russia and China’s early advantage in the public relations race.
However, “the best way to tackle that is not through more vaccine diplomacy,” but instead through COVAX’s coordinated approach, he contended. “The objective here is to protect the world from this virus. The objective is not to have a geopolitical competition.”
However, that geopolitical competition is proving irresistible. In a letter dated May 6 — just days after Sweden’s COVAX donation — Prime Minister Stefan Löfven joined other top COVAX supporters Macron and Sánchez, along with the prime ministers of Belgium and Denmark, to call for urgent approval of a European dose-sharing mechanism “to complement and support COVAX’s leading role.”
Addressing their message to Michel, the leaders continued, “Vaccines have become security policy, and the EU cannot afford to lag behind.”
Rym Momtaz, Carlo Martuscelli and Cristina Gallardo contributed reporting.
This article has been updated. It has also been corrected to note the precise number of doses Romania has sent to Moldova.
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