For the European Union, the second quarter cannot come soon enough. The vaccine rollout has been beset by problems, some unforeseen, some the responsibility of member states, some down to the European Commission's procurement strategy, and some of it down to AstraZeneca.
But none of it is pretty. The success of the UK’s rollout, by contrast, has been galling. For eurosceptics, it is the ultimate vindication of Brexit; for the EU, Britain’s success has literally been at Europe’s expense, due to a belief that AstraZeneca gave tens of millions of vaccine doses to the UK that should have gone to the EU.
Getting a dispassionate or fair-minded perspective on what has gone wrong is not easy. The arguments are mired in hidden contracts, the