As Angela Merkel sat down to crisis talks with vaccine manufacturers on Monday, she faced a dilemma.
The veteran chancellor has had a good pandemic until now. But the European vaccine debacle has hit Germany hard, and Mrs Merkel has a tough choice to make. At home, there are calls to abandon any semblance of solidarity with the European Union and follow Britain’s lead in going it alone to secure enough vaccines for her people.
But on the wider European stage she has dominated for more than a decade, she faces nervousness and suspicion from EU partners who fear Germany may be about to abandon them in the race for vaccinations.
Germany’s highest-selling newspaper, Bild, made its preference clear on Monday in an editorial for “National bulk orders of the best vaccines the world can offer, if necessary outside the EU — no matter the cost.”
There were even demands from the German Left for wartime-style forced production, with pharmaceutical companies ordered to manufacture their rivals’ vaccines. The whole thing left one Spanish MEP warning of the rise of a new “vaccine nationalism”.
In fact, it was the opposite of nationalism that left Germany, the country where the first Western vaccine was developed, in the absurd position of facing a shortage. Last summer, when Britain and the US were already placing major orders, Mrs Merkel overruled an attempt by Jens Spahn, the German health minister, to secure sufficient stocks.
If she had left Mr Spahn alone to do his job, the chances are Germany could now have vaccinated as many people as the UK. But Mrs Merkel insisted all Germany’s orders must go through the EU as a gesture of European solidarity, and ordered him to write a grovelling letter conceding control of the issue to Ursula von der Leyen.
That looked a serious mistake on Monday, as German MPs announced plans to summon Mrs von der Leyen before them to account for the fiasco. Not for the first time, postwar Germany had been hamstrung by its anxiousness to be seen as a good European.
For obvious historical reasons, there is a deep aversion in modern Germany to anything that could be construed as nationalism — even when it comes to ordering enough of a lifesaving vaccine the country itself developed.
“What would people say if the Germans succeeded in having twice as many doses as us?” Clément Beaune, France’s Europe minister, said on Monday — and it was that fear that prompted Mrs Merkel’s decision.
But the high-minded principle of solidarity ran against the rocks of Mrs von der Leyen and her European Commission, and Germany was left scrambling to secure enough vaccine for its people.
On Monday, Mrs Merkel stuck to her promise that Germany should be able to “offer a vaccine” to every adult citizen by the end of September.
But now there are even calls for Germany to follow Hungary’s example and turn to the Russian and Chinese vaccines — including from Markus Söder, the Bavarian regional leader who may well end up succeeding Mrs Merkel.
But Mr Söder is never short of an eye-catching pronouncement to get his name in the papers, and Germany has no need for such drastic measures.
The EU vaccine shambles may have left the country facing embarrassing shortages for now, but with the finances of Europe’s biggest economy at her disposal and one of the most effective vaccines developed on home soil, Mrs Merkel is well placed to buy herself out of trouble.
Her government on Monday released details of orders for 323m doses from various manufacturers by the end of the year, including 96m by the end of June and a further 126m by the end of October.
Crucially, the lion’s share of these orders are not from AstraZeneca, the company hit by the most severe production delays, but from Pfizer-BioNTech. Pfizer claims issues which hit its Belgian factory last month have been solved, and a brand new BioNTech factory in Germany will go into operation this month, ramping up production significantly.
Germany has orders for 100m doses from Pfizer, compared to 56m from AstraZeneca. And 36m of these are direct from the company, not through the EU quota.
Mrs Merkel’s government has already begun quietly making its own extra orders outside the EU system — it also placed direct orders for 27m doses from Moderna — to the anger of the Italian government, which accused it of betraying European solidarity.
The Pfizer vaccine is considerably more expensive than some of its rivals, but that will be no problem for Germany, particularly since Mrs Merkel can present it to the German public as investing in a German product.
Indeed, Germany already has more of the Pfizer vaccine than most of its neighbours because it agreed to take more than its share from the EU quota when they balked at the price.
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