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Coffee House Shots

Where the vaccine debate goes next

Coffee House Shots

The Spectator

News, Politics, Government, Daily News

4.42.1K Ratings

🗓️ 1 February 2021

⏱️ 10 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The EU's row with AstraZeneca came to a head on Friday, with the bloc publishing its contract with the pharmaceutical giant and introducing vaccine export controls. With the UK's rollout continuing at pace, where will the vaccine debate go next? Isabel Hardman speaks to James Forsyth and Katy Balls. 

Transcript

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0:00.0

Get 12 weeks of The Spectator in print and online for just £12. And we'll give you a £20

0:06.1

£20, Amazon Give Voucher, absolutely free. Go to spectator.com.uk forward slash voucher.

0:17.6

Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shotsots, The Spectators Daily Politics Podcast.

0:22.3

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

0:26.4

Well, James, there's been a weekend of drama between the EU and the UK, not on Brexit, but on vaccines.

0:34.2

Explain what's been going on.

0:35.4

There was a long-running row between the EU and

0:37.8

AstraZeneca after AstraZeneca told the EU that it was going to get radically less vaccine than

0:43.3

the EU had expected. We then had a slightly crazy Friday where the European Commission published

0:49.7

its contract with AstraZeneca. It published it in a redacted form, but a redacted form that was actually,

0:55.4

if you could do some kind of clever computer technology, you could read the whole contract.

0:59.4

And what I think was interesting about the decision to publish the contract was the contract

1:03.0

actually didn't strengthen the European Commission's case greatly, I think. It said,

1:07.6

it talked about kind of reasonable best efforts and things like that,

1:16.2

rather than run the more legally binding language that we think is in the UK government's contract of AstraZeneca.

1:17.8

EU commission sources then suggested they thought the UK should publish its contract of

1:21.6

AstraZeneca, which obviously the UK was not going to do because it's not in the UK's interest

1:25.8

to do that.

1:26.9

But then we had a very dramatic development when the EU produced a vaccine export

1:31.2

notification system, which was essentially export controls by another name,

1:35.3

which is any vaccine being shipped out of the EU.

1:38.0

You have to notify the Commission and the national government from which you're shipping it from,

...

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