Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker. My guest today has made a rapid

rise through the ranks in French politics. Clement Bone is not yet 40, but he's already

Minister for European Affairs and a trusted ally of President Emmanuel Macron. The COVID pandemic

has presented France and the EU with an enormous challenge,

and right now the bloc is struggling to find effective answers. Most obvious is the relatively

slow rollout of a mass vaccination program. France has given some two million people their first

dose, while the UK total is

approaching 13 million. Some in Britain and in Europe link that to Brexit, with the perception

being that Britain has been able to respond more nimbly than a collective group of 27 nations

sharing one procurement plan.

There are other big questions, too, with the virus mutating and the future uncertain,

how dangerous are open borders?

And what will that mean for an EU club devoted to the idea of internal freedom of movement. Well, Clement Bone joins me now from Paris.

Welcome to Hard Talk. Good evening. Thank you for his invitation.

It's a pleasure to have you on the show. Minister, I'd like to begin with the COVID crisis facing all of Europe.

Would you say you are satisfied with the way the European Union has rolled out the mass vaccination programme?

Listen, I think we have made a choice collectively.

That was not an obligation, but we chose to do so with all the EU countries

to buy together the vaccines. And now we have six contracts. We will have probably two more

with pretty much all the laboratories making all the available vaccines in the words at this very moment. I think this choice remains

a relevant choice because if we had not done so at the EU level, I think we would be now

in a competition between member states, between countries, trying to get the doses that the

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