Europe's Vaccine Disaster
From what I've gathered (unfortunately mostly on Reddit, before this article), Ursula von der Leyen wasn't exactly fondly thought of in Germany before this and somehow keeps managing to fail upwards. Is that accurate?<p>The utterly bonkers u-turn today was a bit of a shocker. For those that haven't seen the news, the European Commission managed to say they were effectively going to establish border controls between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Which was a pretty big surprise to both the ROI and the UK. The first not being consulted on the decision, and the UK somehow being blamed for a contractual dispute between the EU and AstraZeneca. They've now backed out of this decision: <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/29/eu-controls-on-vaccine-exports-to-northern-ireland-trigger-diplomatic-row" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/29/eu-controls-on...</a><p>Even if the UK was somehow being duplicitous here, and had somehow undermined the EU vaccine program, the EC/EU has made themselves look like total amateurs by whining about it in public and trying to shift the blame and conflating the UK & AstraZeneca. I think they really need to sit a bunch of the big names down together and actually plan their public strategy; Macron's been out today going in a completely different direction but somehow also circling back to blame the UK and simultaneously claiming (falsely) that the Oxford vaccine has a less than 10% success rate in over 65s, which probably isn't going to boost vaccine adoption: <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/29/emmanuel-macron-coronavirus-vaccine-exports-eu-controlled" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/29/emmanuel-macro...</a><p>It has been an...odd day, as someone who is a very pro-EU, remain-voting, UK citizen. God knows we deserve plenty of blame as a nation but I don't really feel like it's altogether deserved this time.