Thread by @Manish_05Singh

"With every British jab,the European vaccine failure looks more and more like the tale of two leaders who put ideology over good politics and who were so eager to demonstrate the superiority of Brussels to the nation state that they forgot to do their job"
thetimes.co.uk/article/german…

It was not mysterious circumstances, misfortune or coincidence that led to the vaccine fiasco. It was bad political decisions.

It was #Merkel who instructed the German health ministry last June to hand vaccine procurement to the European Commission.

Merkel even ordered her health minister to write to #vonderLeyen, begging forgiveness for having tried to set up contracts with manufacturers w/o EU's permission

Calamitous Merkel as I have long maintained
Germany and the EU will count cost of her failures long after she is gone

#vonderLeyen gave the most important task in EU history to Stella Kyriakides,a bureaucrat from Cyprus w/o any qualifications for the job
#Kyriakides posted a picture of herself relaxing on a balcony last Sept. while the EU still hadn't secured a fraction of the vaccines it needed

contrast that with what the UK did.
The UK called up Kate Bingham, an expert from the private sector.
Kate Bingham put her role as a life-sciences venture capitalist on hold last July when she was approached by PM Boris Johnson to head up the UK's Vaccine Taskforce (VTF).