What happens across the ditch is not widely reported but there seems to be turmoil and frequent riots. Pictures of those do appear but not what set them off - or who.
What is the European take on all of this?

What is a "European take"? After all, the UK - last I looked - is still part of Europe, so that's a pretty broad "take" you're looking for, or so I take it.

Here in Norway, depending on which newspaper you read, there are multiple "takes" on various incidents of civil disobedience, protest, and even riots as per the Netherlands at the moment. I assume the same is true everywhere. I've even found some various British "takes" on these, including versions of "what set them off or who". Maybe you just need to read more newspapers? The ones you're depending on might just be letting you down a bit.

Chortle - And in Get Smart style - So  here we with that Good Ol' Semantic wrangle when dodging specifics. Take - as used here was what do other posters here make of it all and the reasons for it rather than what such press as I might read may offer.  We have EU contributors here - what is the collective noun for people who live in the EU? E-Uists? - Sounds like a collection of jugs, E Unionists?  E By Gum comes to mind - or as in the subcontinent some found it utterly impossible to say 'school' but always said it as 'EE-school' so I am comfortable with Ee Unionist. Anyway, a rose by any other name, what do you lot have to say about riots assorted - are these less sinister than appears?

I see (I think).

Ok, well my "European" take on it, which is just as "European" as your own take on it, is that anti-Covid restriction demonstrations (current trending demo flavour among the modern rebels sans cause), no matter where they pop up or how they are conducted, all so far seem to have been organised rather organically via social media by individuals as diverse in intelligence, outlook and political allegiance as those who turn up. When those who turn up are interviewed - regardless of who is doing the interviewing or what agenda they themselves might have - you end up with a range of motives to attend ranging from tin foil hattery to hard hat hatery and with all points between represented too.

Countries with pre-Covid existing levels of fomented dissatisfaction with government policies - such as the UK, Germany, France, Belgium and a few others - tend to produce the demonstrations most likely to be well attended and maybe descend into violence (the Netherlands was a bit of a surprise, but not much really if one goes back over the last decade and looks at street protests there). Others, such as in Ireland, tend to veer more to the comical tin foil hattery end of the scale and descend into apathy and wandering off pretty quickly, especially if it's raining I notice. In Norway I haven't seen anything similar at least here in Oslo as yet, but then we woke up to minus 17 here today, so that might have something to do with it.

Pinning a common political agenda on the participants is a media sport, I think, played mostly by extreme left or right pundits. However these "analyses" don't bear up to too much scrutiny, especially if you read or watch interviews with the individuals concerned.

Priscilla wrote:

What happens across the ditch is not widely reported but there seems to be turmoil and frequent riots. Pictures of those do appear but not what set them off - or who.
What is the European take on all of this?

I found -so far- one EU take on this: https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2021/01/are-the-rioters-spoilt-frustrated-or-on-a-moral-holiday-what-the-papers-say/.
It seems to me the UK press are exaggerating anything which goes wrong in Europe.  I wonder why?

That "EU take" is really a "Dutch take" on a Dutch incident, but well found brenogler. I was particularly "taken" with the behavioural psychologist quoted in one paper:

Quote :

... behavioural psychologist Frenk van Harreveld said that ‘no mercy’ should be shown to hardened rioters. ‘There’s only one thing you can do with this small group and that is lock them up,’ Herreveld said.

Frenk is obviously a fan of Not The Nine O'Clock News.



.

And that Astra Brexit is that also an EUliphant? Or just some normal commericial profit dispute? Or something else?

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/27/business/astrazeneca-ceo-eu-criticism/index.html

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/speech_21_211

And already an inspection in a Belgian producer site of the vaccin to see if Astra don't cheat about its difficulties in production.

It's looking very much like a backhander situation, Paul. If production levels hadn't dropped everyone was prepared to turn a blind eye to the lop-sided distribution pattern which the British tax payer apparently paid for twice - once by purchase order and once between "mates" as per Johnson's normal modus operandi thus far. The two defences so far put forward by the company - "Britain paid first" and "Production has dropped by 4/5 in Europe but has gone up by 1/5 in the UK" - are illegal and illogical respectively and certainly only promote suspicion of chicanery even further as long as they receive wide media attention and reporting.

All the same, backhander or no backhander, if the EU plays hard-ball and imposes normal export terms on the stuff involved in the process moving to the UK, thereby disrupting the production of the finished article at that end, then everyone loses out. So from both a health point of view and a purely political point of view I reckon the "blind eye" approach will simply continue, but now it will apply to Astra Zeneca quietly "fixing" the distribution anomaly without much further fuss and everyone simply gets on with vaccinating people as close to the planned schedule as over-projected supply quantities make possible.

It's over to Johnson now, really. He can double down and persist, even making it into an "us versus them" thing which plays well to his support base, or else he can quietly back down, hope no one asks just how big the bribe was, and play ball. From recent statements he's made, such as those he made yesterday in the House of Commons, it appears he's indeed backing down. He clearly wants the spotlight on this from the general news media to be turned off, it seems. The distribution correction won't immediately change the actual vaccination rate in the UK, which is quite impressive now that it's being done by the NHS, but it will prevent him from making more absolutely batshit crazy pie-in-the-sky promises to his own people involving magic numbers plucked out of his arse as a way of deflecting from his ongoing failures. If that's the only political fall-out from this incident then I think both the EU and the bulk of the British population can easily live with that.

nordmann, thank you very much for your take on this question. I learned from your background information.
Kind regards, Paul.

I take back what I said about this being resolved quietly, Paul. Now that I see the amounts involved (cash, not doses). Astra Zeneca published a redacted version of their contract with the EU yesterday and rather tellingly blanked out the money bit, which of course has only focused attention on this very issue. According to sources within the EU, the company and Whitehall it seems the EU paid twice the commercial rate per dose for whatever it was promised. The UK however is handing over seven times that amount per dose (so 14 times the commercial rate) to this private company and has basically put no top limit to the amount of doses it will commit to. I'm no mathematician but if, as epidemioligists warn, we end up in a situation where vaccination becomes not just two doses per individual but many more over many years as Covid mutates and fails to be eradicated globally, then Astra Zeneca's bank account will contain the entire British exchequer revenues by 2024.

It's no wonder the EU commission appears to be flailing around wildly looking for the rules by which it can get what it paid for and getting nowhere fast. They're up against a bunch of Eton types for whom "rules" are a concept vaguely attached to rugger (and even then were made to be broken) and for whom public revenue is simply one more pot of someone else's cash they can appropriate to keep themselves in the style to which they are entitled to be accustomed.

Astra Zeneca at this stage aren't so much "laughing all the way to the bank" as already collapsed with mirth inside its vaults while being buried in a seemingly infinite amount of taxpayers' money. British taxpayers, that is. The EU and anyone else who foolishly thought rules mattered and the point was that we all chip in to end a pandemic have been well and truly blind-sided.

My prediction now is that the EU will abandon dealing with the company altogether, insist on its money back (including the presently unconfirmed 3 billion euro "grant" it made for the company to repurpose its European based plants from research to manufacturing), ensure that Johnson sees it as politically expedient to accelerate and accommodate this demand so the UK press doesn't focus on what he's done, and happily take this huge chunk of cash (kindly donated by British taxpayers) to invest in less corrupt supply sources of other vaccines.

"Brexiteers" in the UK will cheer this as a "victory" over the "enemy". And with all such victories of theirs so far, the average UK citizen will just be plunged even deeper into shit (I see the Sun newspaper has already done so). Back in the real world other vaccines will come online, hopefully produced by less corrupt people, and the EU will simply get back to its rule-based plan.

The only question left is which will kill more people - the delay in the plan's execution in Europe or the corruption currently running the show in the UK.

Nevertheless some of the EU's current vaccine problems are of it's own making.The commission negotiated the contracts on behalf of the EU as a way to avoid the ugly free-for-all that erupted last year, when national governments squabbled over orders of PPE and medical devices. The idea of a centralised procurement policy was not only to ensure a fair deal for all, but to leverage the collective negotiating weight of the 27 EU member states, although no states were bound by it are were all free to independently source vaccine supplies, as some have done.

The commission, negotiating for the first time on vital medicines, felt that EU countries would demand value for money, so it dragged out the talks to secure better prices and product liability guarantees. That meant it signed the contracts with AstraZeneca in August, three months after the UK’s contract. The EU’s joint approach may have secured lower prices and guarantees, but it came at the expense of speed. The approval process was also strung out. Last year, worried that vaccine scepticism might hamper the rollout, the commission and national governments insisted the Amsterdam-based European Medicines Agency (EMA) should not stint on its vital regulatory scrutiny. But that meant the first EU-approved vaccine, by Pfizer/BioNTech, was only offered from 27 December, some 16 days after the UK started to use it.

Nevertheless the EU has already potentially secured supplies for far more vaccines than it needs, with a current portfolio of more than 2.3bn doses which is more than five times the EU’s 450 million population. It has contracts with five different vaccine makers: not only AstraZeneca and Pfizer/BioNTech, but Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, and CureVac. It has also wrapped up exploratory talks with Novavax and Valneva. It will take time to approve, manufacture, supply and then roll out the vaccinations, but then with different virus strains emerging, a successful one-off universal vaccination program is probably an unrealistic hope, and for the next couple of years at least, multiple doses of different and enhanced vaccines may well be required. As the French PM has said, tackling the virus "is a marathon not a sprint".

I'm not sure "problems of their own making" is the best term to describe the negative consequences of caution and adherence to rules that has so far typified the EU procurement policy. Here in Norway (which has paid to be included in that procurement as well as doing its own bit on the side) the negative press has been solely directed at the delay in getting up to speed on the mass vaccination plan because of the extreme caution in licensing the product. However this criticism is qualified always with a hope on the other hand that we all don't get sucked in to a dependency on a possibly dodgy clinical solution (as in Russia for example) or one that simply bleeds us dry of all funds without guaranteeing a solution either (as in the UK), simply because we moved with indecent haste. I see from French and German media the same concerns and the same qualifications are also much expressed there.

What is certainly true is that the way the Astra Zeneca fiasco is being reported here versus in the UK media (even The Guardian end of the scale) is very different indeed. By far the largest criticism directed against the EU here is to do with the money, not for the product but the up-front investment it paid AZ to "re-purpose" existing research facilities with small manufacturing capability to become mass manufacturing plants. It seems AZ took this money and invested it mostly in its UK plant, which made sense as that was the one already most adaptable for mass manufacture. However the EU simply "trusted" this meant that it would then get its fair share of whatever was manufactured there even if supply levels didn't match expectations. Instead AZ, after taking this money, has drastically lowered its supply to the EU and increased its supply to the UK basically to "no limit".

Whatever about what this rather obviously points to regarding the UK and AZ's trustworthiness and possibly even criminality, to Norwegians that's still naivete involving public funds, an unforgivable crime in these quarters (or at least getting found out is). The rest of the stuff - delays in supply, having to change plans, falling even further out with the vile nest of rancid corruption that is the UK government - is simply logical consequence.

I agree with your  summation of the UK 'government', Nordmann.
 Their ridiculous boasting of world-beating initiatives such as setting up massive Nightingale hospitals without anyone to staff them has been beyond pathetic.


 Now that inocculation does seem to be working well we find it is nothing to do with the government but down to the NHS  (though I'm sure the government will claim some credit).

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/jan/31/industralised-vaccine-behind-scene