Chris

I am having an impossibly hard time believing that the UK’s refusal to join the EU procurement programme would not be being discussed at length in this thread right now, had the vaccine approval/supply situation been reversed. There was certainly attempted point scoring at the time that decision was made - Brexit ideology before people’s lives, etc etc etc. Der schuh ist now on the other fuss.

You’re making the tired old remainer error of assuming that criticism of the EU and the UK’s relationship to it can be boiled down to xenophobia. That’s not the case and continually having to rebut that tired old trope is getting very tedious.

The EU is a political construct that continues to extend and deepen its influence over its members thanks to the basic assumption that a concept they call “pooled sovereignty” is better than nation states acting for themselves. The UK has in this case been able to act in a more agile manner than the sclerotic EU bureaucracy to get vaccine approval and distribution going earlier and at a faster rate. It has leveraged long-standing policies that have continued to encourage world-leading research to happen here as well as high-tech manufacturing. Part of the package here is attracting the highly educated and talented individuals to come here to do their research and development and to work in these cutting-edge manufacturing processes - wherever in the world they come from.

I have no desire to turn the coronavirus thread into another Brexit/EU thread, but not do I have any intention of allowing such a glaring failure in EU policy to pass unregarded, not when the UK’s approach (possible only because we have left the EU) has so far been a world-leader.