Vivat Vaxit

But for Brexit, we'd be stuck in the EU's vaccine nightmare. Or would we?

In my more fanciful moments I imagine Comical Dummings, Boris Johnson's very own Mad Monk, foreseeing the coronavirus back in 2016 and realising Brexit was essential if the catastrophically incompetent government he planned was going to make it through the pandemic. If only Britain could go its own way on vaccines, everything else would be noise.

Clearly that's just silly. But the point is that I'm a dyed-in-the-wool remoaner, and even I sometimes wonder whether, for reasons wholly unpredictable and just as surprising to the Brexiturds as anyone else, Brexit has turned out to be a good thing, when you see that the UK has inoculated 42% of the population with a first dose while the EU has done just 13%. If we were still in the EU, would be struggling to vaccinate our people too?

Before we get into that, it's worth remarking that the present vaccine war, vaccine nationalism, vaccine protectionism or whatever you want to call it — the squabbling and mistrust over the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine — is at least exacerbated by, and in all probability largely caused by Brexit. About half of Spaniards, Germans and French now think the jab is harmful, despite iron-clad scientific evidence to the contrary, and the horrible piquancy is that now that diffidence is leaching back into the British psyche.

So imagine a rona-afflicted Europe in which the UK was working in harmony with its 27 fellow member states, and in which post-Brexit border controls were not disrupting deliveries and supply chains. Does it sound counterproductive? On the subject of border controls, they are possibly the one gift from Brexit that we could have used to our benefit, but the government signally failed time and again to impose restrictions on movement that could have slowed the sprint of the virus across continents. That said, individual EU states have, unlike Britain, used tactical border closures to stem the viral flow, as is quite clearly allowed in the Schengen agreement.

The EU vaccine strategy has inevitably been a slow and lumbering beast. Being responsible for ourselves only has seemingly allowed Britain to move fast and take things. Well, buy things. But, as the EU Observer website points out, Germany has a side deal with Pfizer. The strategy is designed as a safety net, not a restriction. So it's hard to think anyone would have tried to stop Britain pursuing its own deals with vaccine-makers. Indeed there has been since last March a clear, if tacit, acceptance that the severity of the pandemic overrides legislative norms. The emergency powers the UK government has granted itself would hardly have been stymied by Brussels.

Perhaps the most irritating part of the assumption that Britain is better out of the EU vaccine strategy — which, remember, we were given the generous offer of joining — is that it would have been just as slow and lumbering with us as it is without us. But the reason we're doing so well at vaccination is that it plays to our strengths as a nation. Research and hi-tech manufacture are big industries in Britain, so of course we're good at producing vaccines. And as part of the EU we'd have been even better. We'd be just as far ahead, if not further, and our 27 friends would certainly be better off with us at the heart of an EU programme. Just imagine it.

The final question to ask is: how much benefit is it to us, ultimately, to be ahead in the vaccination race? As Boris Johnson himself has repeatedly pointed out, until the whole world is vaccinated, the job isn't done. The jab differential looks likely to prevent Britons from going to our favourite continental holiday spots this summer — so are we really winning here anyway?