Thoughts from Pontevedra, Galicia, Spain: 17.3.21

 Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.  

- Christopher Howse: 'A Pilgrim in Spain'

Covid 

Yesterday morning, I wrote of the rising number of cases and deaths in Germany, Italy and, especially, France. By the evening, another lockdown had been announced in each of these.

The AZ vaccine: The German claim is that the blood clots attributed to it are of a new type. Hence the suspensions there and elsewhere. Critics say that, even if there is evidence that the attribution to the vaccine is accurate, more deaths will be caused than saved by the application of the (originally French) precautionary principle that dominates thinking in the (overly bureaucratic) EU. There's no shortage of experts - even in Berlin and Brussels - who decry this development, on the basis that there's no evidence that the AZ causes the blood clots and that, even if it does, it's no more dangerous than the other vaccines. Or than life itself. Tomorrow's verdict of EMA is now awaited, at least in those countries which have gone for 'death-engendering' suspension.

The big questions now, include:-

- Even if the EMA supports a return to use of the AZ vaccine, will the spooked public have it?  

- If not, will the relevant EU countries stop talking of suing AZ for breach of contract for a shortage in deliveries?,

- What will these countries do with the stockpile of the vaccine they already have? And:

- Will they return them to AZ, or gift them to 3rd world countries?

Not to mention: Who, if anyone, will be held responsible for the increase in deaths?

As I said yesterday, not a good time to be political leader. In the EU at least.

Cosas de España y Galiza  

 

Madrid is reported to be overrun with French and, to a lesser extent, German visitors who aren't allowed to party back home and are taking advantage of the refusal of the Madrid region Presidenta to apply the 'perimetral lockdown' agreed to by all other 16 regions. So  . . .  how many Covid-bearing visitors will be get from the capital? Or from France and Germany? All flights from these countries are said to be fully booked. Effing madness.

  

At the moment, here in Galicia nothing has been reported about a ban on inter-municipality travel this coming holiday weekend and during Semana Santa. I'm planning a short trip with friends to Pontedeume but, understandably, we're reluctant to pay for reservations anywhere.

Maria's Tsunami: Day 44 

The UK

Boris Johnson's government has issued a 114 page Integrated Review of the UK's present and future. For Richard North, it's page after page of vainglorious blather - the very essence of extruded verbal material, as meaningless words spill over the paper to describe a world which exists only in the febrile mind of a man who has completely lost touch with reality. It's all based, says RN, on the vision of a congenital liar with the management skills of a deranged rhinoceros and the technical abilities of a moribund slug. We're not in trouble; we're doomed.  He might well be right but, with some help from the hapless EU, the vaccine success has meanwhile given the prime minister such a 'Boris Bounce' that, despite all the egregious errors of the last 12 months, his party is still ahead of the opposition Labour in the latest polls. So . . . Are most of the people being fooled most of the time?

The EU

Well, Ambrose Evans Pritchard didn't take long to answer my question yesterday of whether the precautionary principle would be the death of the EU. See the 1st article below, headed: The French precautionary principle is literally killing Europe.

It's well known that the founders of the EU felt that crises would give opportunities to take moves towards 'ever-closer union' that the public wouldn't accept in normal times. It might well be that the Covid crisis will not only prove to be an exception but will actually be 'a bridge too far'. With very serious consequences for The Project. Meanwhile, the headlines of the 2nd article below are: EU leaders turn on each other in AstraZeneca Covid vaccine row. European Commission accuses member states of stockpiling vaccines as bloc faces third virus wave. 

En passant, it's astonishing to read that, back in 1911, Germany and France came to the edge of war over which of them would 'own' Morocco, with Spain playing a subordinate role. Even more surprising to read the British Foreign Secretary's comment: There is no conceivable danger of Britain being dragged into a European war, unless there is some Power, or group of Powers which has the ambition of achieving the Napoleonic policy and forcing each [of the others] into the orbit of the strongest Power. Guess which power that turned out to be. For the first time round.

Germany

Here's the (very) caustic view of one German on what's happened in his fatherland over the last decade or so. Ironically, it opens with a line that could well apply to Johnson's UK government: There is an unwritten rule in politics: If you are incompetent, at least you should not be corrupt. Echoing AEP, the author claims that: Germany is falling farther and farther behind with respect to innovation. This could soon become conventional wisdom . . .

 

The USA

Here's an article on the role the US could play in the European vaccine imbroglio, with some harsh words for continental technocrats who spout the kind of anti-vaxx nonsense that you’d block your aunt on Facebook for.

The Way of the World 

At last, a sensible - if obvious - suggestion: Boys should be taught how to respect women and girls in the streets as part of their sex and relationship education at school. Just one of the ways in which better eduction would contribute to the solution of societal  problems.

Finally  . . . 

In some languages - eg Farsi and Arabic, I think - the P and the F sounds are very hard to distinguish. So telephone becomes telepon. In German, they seem to avoid this by combining the 2 letters, as in Pfalz, Pfälzer, and Pfälzisch - 'words referring to Palatinate region'. 

Talking of languages . . . A while back, I cited the case of the name above a Thai hairdresser's salon that had been mis-translated from English via Google Translate to say something like: There's no one here at the moment. Try later. Now comes this wonderful example from Wales:-

Only a few of you, at best, will know that the Welsh of this sign - provided by an email from the translator - says: I am currently out of the office. Please submit any work to the translation team. At least, that's what I'm told. For all I know, it might not.

  

THE ARTICLES 

 

The French precautionary principle is literally killing Europe: European leaders have destroyed confidence in the AstraZeneca vaccine, meaning even more people will die: Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. The Telegraph

If European countries are going to suspend the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine every time there is a random stochastic death, it would be better if they handed their stocks immediately to Africa and poorer regions of Asia.[And I said this to local friends this morning.  . . .]

The vaccine saga has degenerated into the most abject spectacle of European misgovernment in my working lifetime – although for sheer ineptitude it is hard to beat the absence of a lender-of-last-resort during the eurozone debt crisis.

It is what happens when you push the precautionary principle to the point of absurdity. Once zero-risk thinking becomes reflexive – and institutionalised in law – it leads you into a cul-de-sac of systemic self-harm.

We have extensive epidemiological data in the UK’s weekly “yellow card” summary of vaccines. As of February 28, there had been 227 deaths shortly after the Pfizer-BioNTech jab and 275 after the Oxford-AstraZeneca jab. It is a statistical miracle that there had not been more.

AstraZeneca reported 15 cases of deep vein thrombosis and 22 cases of pulmonary embolism following the jab out of 17m doses in the UK and Europe. “This is much lower than would be expected to occur naturally in a general population of this size and is similar across other licensed Covid-19 vaccines,” it said. One might (frivolously) infer that the jab protects against these events. 

Belgium’s health council has refused to join the stampede as Germany, France, and Italy are swept along by mood, all ignoring the European Medicines Agency. The Belgians stated that blood clotting cases occur “in the same order of frequency as with the Pfizer vaccine”. Quite. 

What is absolutely certain is that significant numbers of Europeans will die of Covid because time is imperative and they do not have an alternative at hand. These will no longer be random stochastic deaths. People will die as a direct result of the action of their regulators and governments. Others will suffer organ damage and the well-known pathologies of long-Covid.  

Europe’s leaders have by now irreversibly destroyed confidence in the vaccine. Yet France is currently relying on AstraZeneca for over 50pc of its jabs. Italy was counting on it to cover 38pc over the next two weeks. Both countries face a rising third wave that is escaping control.

The feckless handling of AstraZeneca’s vaccine has fed alarmism about vaccinations in general and played to the anti-vaxxers. This will kill even larger numbers. Europe’s leaders should not be surprised if people start to turn against the Pfizer-BioNTech jab since it too – obviously – can be impugned in the same way by random stochastic cases.

The jab suspension makes it even more likely that France’s Emmanuel Macron will lose the political gamble of his presidency. He defied scientific advice in January and refused to impose another lockdown, arguing that every week of delay was a week gained for society and economic recovery.

It was also a week gained for the British, South African, and Brazilian variants. Greater Paris has reached saturation of critical care beds. Patients are being shipped out to the regions. There will soon be Covid TGV trains to Bordeaux. 

This episode of vaccine sabotage more or less guarantees that large parts of Europe will have to follow Italy into partial or full lockdowns through Easter, and probably as far out as early summer. The second tourist season slips away. One can try to calculate the exorbitant economics costs of delayed reopening but the effect is non-linear. There comes a point when the structural damage goes so deep that it never recovers.

I argued last December that Europe’s vaccine travails – already implicit then – amounted to a black swan event for the EU project and risked morphing into a dangerous political crisis. But I never expected to see a collective lurch into scientific obscurantism. 

Where did it all go wrong? The precautionary principle was incorporated into EU jurisprudence with the Amsterdam Treaty in 1997 and has become over time the defining ideological feature of an ageing, defensive, status quo society that seems to be afraid of everything.

As it happens, 1997 also marks the moment when Europe began to decouple from the US and go into economic decline, although monetary union also dates from that time and has played a role. It is an astonishing thought that per capita income in the eurozone had actually slipped to $39,928 even before the pandemic hit, while in America it had kept rising to $62,795, according to World Bank data. The post-Covid gap will be even wider.

The precautionary principle has been married with another EU deformity: its slow, rigid, legalistic ethos, and its 190,000 pages of near-irreversible Acquis. The two together have reinforced each other in a paralysing fashion. This regime is perfect for vested interests that know how to play the Brussels game and manipulate the regulatory committees. The zero-risk code can be mobilised to shut out rivals and new technologies that pose a commercial threat.

Is it a coincidence that the EU has become a technology spectator over the last quarter century, while America and China vie for supremacy? Might the precautionary principle be the reason why not a single one of the world’s 20 most valuable tech companies is European, and why the region lags again in artificial intelligence?

It is true that BioNTech’s ground-breaking mRNA vaccine was made in Germany, but its founders are Turkish immigrants and most of the clinical trials took place in the US, Turkey, Brazil, Argentina and South Africa. It is famously difficult to conduct clinical trials in the EU. 

It is also true that the precautionary principle has made inroads into Anglo-Saxon societies. But only up to a point. The US, the UK, and Canada still cleave towards the ‘innovation principle’, a preference for trial-and-error and a willingness to risk failure along the way — “nothing ventured, nothing gained”. 

You could argue that this philosophy has its roots in English Common Law, a legal culture that loosely permits behaviour unless explicitly forbidden by statute. It is fundamentally different from Napoleonic law that prohibits behaviour unless explicitly authorised – “guilty until proven innocent”. Legal scholars will object to this contrasting schema but it contains a nugget of truth.

The innovation philosophy also has roots in the Baconian Method: the scientific interrogation of facts: the bottom-up empiricism of Francis Bacon and his followers, from Newton through to the Scottish Enlightenment, and beyond. There are great Baconians in Continental Europe of course, but they are not dominant. 

What is dominant is the top-down Cartesian Method instilled into the French civil service, and through them into the EU’s machinery. It has fused with the zero-risk totemism of modern Germans to produce a precautionary monster, and a long list of destructive policies. The consequence of banning GMO crops – that is to say, refusing to use technology to tweak genes for better yields – is that you end up using more chemicals instead. Cui bono?

When Germany began to shut down its nuclear plants in a fit of hysteria after Fukushima, heavy industry turned to coal instead, pushing up CO2 emissions and killing measurable numbers of people with toxic particulates.

The vaccine saga has driven home the point that the British people really are different animals from Continental Europeans, a cultural distinction that dates back at least 700 years and one that is amply explored by Cambridge anthropologist Alan MacFarlane in The Origins of English Individualism. This island Sonderweg is not a myth.

Vaccine take-up has been extraordinary. People have been rational and have shown trust in scientific authority, other than a few pockets contaminated by social media. Sang-froid has prevailed. Europe’s alarmism seems completely foreign at this juncture.

The issue is not so much that the UK has had a good vaccine rollout while the EU has stumbled. It is the mental chasm that matters. We can see more clearly than ever that Baconians cannot share a close political, legislative, and judicial union – tantamount to a unitary state – with anti-Baconians in thrall to an extreme form of the precautionary principle. The relationship is unworkable. 

Europeans have to ask themselves whether they want to end up in a permanent defensive crouch while the rest of the world moves on. One thing is sure: a zero-risk society is finished as a civilisational force. It is dead.

2. EU leaders turn on each other in AstraZeneca Covid vaccine row. European Commission accuses member states of stockpiling vaccines as bloc faces third virus wave.  Justin Huggler. The Telegraph

Brussels blamed EU governments for growing vaccine chaos on Tuesday night as it accused them of stockpiling jabs despite a looming third Covid wave. 

The European Commission's rare rebuke of member states came after 17 countries including Germany, France, Italy and Spain halted the rollout of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine until the EU's medicines regulator completes an investigation. 

On Tuesday, however, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) said there was "no indication" that the suspended AstraZeneca vaccine caused fatal blood clots. It will give the result of its investigation on Thursday.

While new figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed the success of the UK's vaccination programme – with three quarters of over-80s and one in three overall now testing positive for antibodies against Covid – the French prime minister and Germany's national disease centre warned of a third wave.

Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, urged European countries to follow the lead of Britain's "world class regulator" and continue using the jab, adding that its "real world impact" had been demonstrated in the 11 million British people who had received it.

In what will be seen as a thinly-veiled swipe at countries that have suspended AstraZeneca vaccinations, Mr Hancock added: "We know not only is it safe, it's actually saving lives here right now."

Stella Kyriakides, the European health commissioner, said on Tuesday that vaccination was "more than ever key" and urged EU member states to use every vaccine they had rather than stockpiling them. 

"Even with the immense and regrettable challenges around production capacity and deliveries, there are reports of unused reservoirs of vaccines across the European Union," she said after a meeting of EU health ministers.

"We currently see the proportions of available vaccine doses distributed range from 50 to 100 percent across member states."

There was fury in Berlin at the decision to suspend the AstraZeneca jab, which now threatens to engulf Angela Merkel's government in a political crisis. Her closest ally, the Bavarian regional leader Markus Söder, broke ranks with the chancellor and told German television he was ready to take the vaccine "immediately". 

Her main coalition partners condemned the decision as a "U-turn" that suggested the government has "no clear policy". Opposition parties called on the health minister to resign, demanded an inquiry and accused Mrs Merkel of endangering lives. 

France and Italy signalled that they were ready to lift their ban on AstraZeneca as soon as the EMA gave the green light on Thursday, which would heap further pressure on Mrs Merkel. Mario Draghi, the new Italian prime minister, spoke to Emmanuel Macron, the French president, on Tuesday, and they agreed to abide by the EMA decision.

Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, who has faced fierce criticism from national governments over the glacial pace of the EU rollout, would "of course" accept the AstraZeneca jab, her spokesman said. 

EU member states have received 62.2 million vaccines under the joint procurement scheme run by Brussels and administered 77 per cent of those – about 48 million shots. About 14.8 million AstraZeneca vaccines have been delivered to EU countries, with less than half, 7.3 million, being used.

The figures include non-EU members Norway and Iceland, which have also suspended the vaccine. 

Sweden, Cyprus, Slovenia and Portugal became the latest EU countries to pause the use of the jab on Tuesday despite the EMA and the World Health Organisation saying it was safe and the EU lagging far behind Britain in its vaccination programme. 

Emer Cooke, the executive director of the EMA, said: "We are still firmly convinced that the benefits of the AstraZeneca vaccine in preventing Covid-19, with its associated risk of hospitalisation, outweighs the risk of the side effects."

Some 30 cases of blood clots among almost five million people vaccinated had been reported to the EMA by March 10, but additional cases had been reported over the weekend, Ms Cooke said. She said the EMA-approved Pfizer and Moderna vaccines appeared to be linked to similar numbers of blood clots around the world as the AstraZeneca one. 

Ms Cooke stressed that the EMA would resist any pressure from powerful governments and would be guided by "science and independence", and admitted the regulator was "worried" about the effect on trust in vaccines after the latest twist in AstraZeneca's  tortured relationship with the EU. 

Scientists and politicians in Britain have defended the AstraZeneca vaccine's record. Professor Dame Clare Gerada, one of the UK's leading doctors and a former president of the Royal College of GPs, accused Europe's leaders of "weaponising" fears over the jab and said they should "get a grip".

Boris Johnson would be "perfectly happy" to have the AstraZeneca jab, his spokesman said, adding that British regulators had been clear the vaccine was safe and effective. 

Asked what his message to EU countries would be, Mr Hancock told reporters: "What I would say is that this Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine is safe and we should listen to the regulators and the British regulator, the world-class regulator, the World Health Organisation and the European Medicines Agency.

"They've all looked at the data. Over 11 million people have been vaccinated with the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, and we can see in the real world its impact. We can see that it is not only safe but saving lives." 

The Duchess of Cornwall also extolled the virtues of the jab on Tuesday, calling it "very good news" as she visited a vaccination centre at the Finsbury Park Mosque. She said she had received the AstraZeneca vaccine and agreed that "you take what you are given" as she chatted with GP Dr John McGrath. 

Germany's national disease centre warned that the country is now in a third wave that could see it break previous records by Easter, and there were also warnings that suspending the vaccine for just one week could cost the economy £1.7 billion.

In France, Jean Castex, the prime minister, said new Covid variants meant the country was "in a sort of third wave".

Frank Ulrich Montgomery, the German head of the World Medical Association, said: "The bottom line, sadly, is that this good and effective vaccine is not being accepted by the public in many countries because of the row and the suspension."

British-Swedish company AstraZeneca has been at loggerheads with the EU over supply shortfalls since January. On Saturday, the company told the Commission there would be a 60 million dose shortfall in its planned deliveries to the bloc by the end of March. 

France's industry minister, Agnes Pannier-Runacher, said AstraZeneca's CEO was in the "hot seat" over the delivery delays, adding that the EMA investigation was necessary to stop "mistrust" in the vaccine.

But Nicola Magrini, the director-general of Italy's medicines agency, said the choice to suspend was "a political one".  "We got to the point of a suspension because several European countries, including Germany and France, preferred to interrupt vaccinations," he told La Repubblica. 

Belgium and Poland, which still use AstraZeneca, criticised the suspensions. "We are never going to get Europe vaccinated like this. Then we're going to get a third, fourth, fifth wave," said Frank Vandenbroucke, the Belgian health minister.

Michal Dworczyk, the Polish prime minister's chief of staff, said: "It is possible that we are dealing with a planned disinformation campaign and a brutal fight of medical companies."