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Hello and welcome to Coffeehouse Shops, The Spectator's Daily Politics Podcast.

I'm Isabel Hardman and I'm joined by James Forsyth and Katie Balls.

James Ursula von der Leyen has opened yet another front in the EU vaccine war. What's happened?

So she gave an interview to a group of European papers. The backstory to this is that there's been some disquiet among the Brussels press corps, but she seemed to, had done several interviews with German language media, but not a kind of pan-European interview. And in that, she talked about countries

cutting, essentially cutting corners on vaccine approval that had started vaccinating before the

EU. Obviously, one of those countries was the UK that went down the emergency authorisation route.

Now, I think this talking about the failure to

uphold their gigantic responsibility to make sure the vaccines are safe strikes me as a slightly

irresponsible thing to say and also a slightly odd thing to say given that the European

Medicines Agency approved both the Oxford AstraZeneca and the Pfizer-Biontac

vaccines as the UK had done. And I also think there is a, there is a danger here that this

strategy backfires. When you consider the levels of vaccine hesitancy among certain EU populations. To start, I think, I think talking

about asking these questions about the vaccine and accusing other countries of making

shortcuts in the approvals process, I think actually risk undermining public confidence within the

EU about taking the vaccine, which is obviously problematic. And Katie, public confidence within the EU about taking the vaccine, which is

obviously problematic. And Katie, public confidence within some EU countries is very low. France in

particular. Yes. And that's why you have to wonder about the long-term wisdom of making dismissive

comments about a vaccine that has been approved, not just by the MHRA in terms of UK use

but has been approved by the EMA, the European Medicines Agency for use in all European countries.

So I think it's a confusing message in the sense that on the one hand, the European body is saying that this can be used in any age group, but then

you have comments from the French suggesting that the UK has moved too fast, or actually

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