SINCE the aim of Boris Johnson’s government is to murder us all in our beds, having privatised us and sold us to Donald Trump – no, hang on, there really are people who believe this, apparently without having asked themselves whether or why anyone would want to – it must have seemed a safe bet to condemn its decision, in March last year, not to join the EU vaccine procurement scheme. This was, quite a lot of folk assured us, not merely a mistake, but tantamount to mass murder.

It requires a certain amount of restraint not to find oneself humming “Who’s sorry now” as you read the tweets and articles by those same people starting: “I never said the EU was perfect but…” in an attempt to maintain that the EU’s appalling behaviour and failures, and the UK’s success, somehow vindicates their previous position. Nonetheless, I am restraining myself, and so, I’m pleased to say, are all but the most idiotic Brexiteer backbenchers.

Even Mr Johnson’s homicidal government, you’ll notice, has not been crowing about how badly the EU has done, compared with how well they have. This despite the fact that in the 24-hour period around Sunday, the UK inoculated more than a million people – about a third as many in one day as the whole of the EU had managed by the end of last week.

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Instead of complaining about the EU’s attempt to break international law within a month of signing a treaty, jeopardising the Anglo-Irish agreement in order to cover up the failings of its own market provision – exactly what it accused the UK Government of intending to do – ministers chose to portray Ursula von der Leyen’s decision to trigger Article 16 as a mistake quickly identified and rectified.

That was more forgiving than most of the continental press – Die Zeit’s headline said that the vaccine row was a vindication of Brexit – or even of other EU officials, such as Michel Barnier, who was scathing. When Sinn Fein, the DUP and the Archbishop of Canterbury unite in condemning you, as one EU official put it, “you can be pretty sure you’ve messed up big time”. (The word used was more forceful than “messed”.)

This whole affair is, however, neither a vindication of Brexit, nor a condemnation of the EU. It’s merely an example of the way in which far too many people are inclined to ignore basic points of fact in order to maintain that “their side” is right.

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There are certainly some things to condemn. Emmanuel Macron’s claim that the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine doesn’t work on the over-65s is, let’s be blunt, a Trump-level lie. The EU’s intervention that created a three-month delay in its schedule, basically in order to save money and insist Brussels should be in charge, now looks like a bad mistake.

But then the UK approach, which threw money at everything, and funded more than 90 per cent of the development of a vaccine that there was no guarantee would work, might easily not have come off. There are lots of other factors besides the EU’s bureaucracy and the UK’s good luck and good planning, including some – like the reluctance of a surprising number of EU citizens to be vaccinated – that are entirely outwith anyone’s control.

That the UK has, at this point, one of the four or five highest death rates per capita – even after you allow for the fact that not everyone calculates their figures in a like-for-like fashion – should certainly be an indication that plenty of mistakes have been made here (and though it doesn’t automatically mean it was politicians who made them, we expect them to carry the can).

But it’s also true that the UK’s vaccination programme is, with the possible exception of Israel’s, the most effective anywhere. And it remains possible, if it works as well as predicted, that the UK’s record may not in the end be as bad as it currently looks. Countries like Germany and France, whose per capita record in case-fatalities is within a couple of tenths of a percentage point of ours, could conceivably end up worse, as Belgium and Italy already are by many measures.

One suspects that some people, that is the people who assured us that the UK’s failure to sign up to the EMA programme was akin to building death camps, would secretly rather like the country to fail. I can understand this tendency in nationalists who want to maintain that we’ve done better than England, which there’s little evidence we have. (Since we’ve employed almost identical policies, even if it were the case it would be because of things like population density and demographics.) It’s more puzzling south of the border, unless you take George Orwell’s view that England is “the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality”.

But all these attitudes are seeing a global catastrophe as some sort of competition. Quite apart from the basic humanity of not taking that approach, it’s hard to see that party politics comes into the pandemic at all. Naturally the UK Government’s primary obligation is to protect its citizens. Even if you think it’s done the world’s worst job thus far, you ought to acknowledge that, in vaccine provision, it’s doing one of the best. By the same token, the EU wants the same for the citizens of its countries, even if it’s blundered badly in trying to do so.

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But the virus, being a virus, isn’t especially interested in anything of the sort and, as a consequence, it won’t do the UK much long-term good if we get everyone vaccinated, but the disease is running wild elsewhere. New Zealand and Australia don’t need to worry about urgent vaccination, because their remoteness and border closures halted the disease in its tracks at an early stage. Western European countries haven’t had that option, if they ever did, since this time last year.

The UK’s contribution to vaccine development has already been altruistic; one condition of the Oxford/AZ plan was that it be sold at cost to developing countries. If, as it looks as if we will, we hit our targets by early spring, the next step should be to distribute any surplus, with Ireland the obvious candidate to be first in the queue.

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