The whole point - the whole point I repeat - of the EU is to pool resources to fight common problems. When it was a matter of pooling doctors, nurses and ventlators to fight a respiratory illness affecting all countries - the EU failed
Countless lives were saved in China and America because resources could be moved to where they were needed. Almost 70 years after its founding treaty, the EU still finds it impossible to perform this basic function
So basically you have free movement of people - so the virus can spread all the more quickly - but no free movement of ventilators
Would have been so easy in February for health ministers to come together and create a mechanism by which ventilators and other critical equipment were pooled together above a national reserve and moved sequentially to where they were needed - instead of lying idle somewhere
At the same time an industrial plan would be put in place to massively expand production using resources from the EU as a whole and moving that production to the common emergency fund
Nothing happened. We spent that time discussing eurobonds in order to fight the 2011 battles all over again
Voluntary cooperation or integration schemes can be agreed without limit in the Council and have been on numerous occasions in recent years. Irrelevant whether it is a EU treaty competence or not.
Germany has thousands of ICU beds with ventilators lying idle. In the meantime people, many people, had to be disconnected from ventilators in Spain and Italy. People who would have lived. How is this not a greater scandal?
