The golem has turned against its creators

The European Union is a golem. It always has been, just that now, it turned against its creators.

Erősödhet a konzervatív politikai erők együttműködése az unióban Fotó: Török János TJ Délmagyarország DM Fotó: Török János/DÉLMAGYAR

Thus far, the past year has brought a new, unknown crisis. The Covid-19 epidemic swept the world like a hurricane. The EU leadership, like a runaway golem, has accumulated mistake after mistake. First, its institutions underestimated the threat of the epidemic and the speed of its spread. Last year it turned out that one of the most developed regions of the world is not able to provide itself with basic supplies like masks, rubber gloves, or ventilators. The richer countries tried to bid higher on these supplies to get them from the poorer, yet quicker, EU countries.

Then the race for vaccines began. Scientists, research institutes and pharmaceutical companies began to develop in Europe, America, Russia, and China. As news of the first scientific results arrived, we could rightly have faith that Europe would be among the winners. After all, for the most part, American, British and EU research was progressing fastest and most successfully. Of course, the EU golem wanted to keep the success for itself.

The bureaucrats announced that if they negotiate with manufacturers, they will acquire the most vaccines and fastest, because a market of five hundred million is more attractive than a stand-alone nation. Hundreds of millions of euros were advanced to several pharmaceutical companies to expand production capacity and speed up manufacturing. Yet for some strange reason, they again committed a series of mistakes or sins. First, experts misjudged which development could be implemented soonest. Therefore, it happened that last year most of our contracts were tied down with a vaccine manufacturer whose development and testing is currently lagging behind most others.

This two billion vaccine shipment is not even on the horizon. On the one end, it is already a sin as it reveals a lack of skill and due diligence. Or worse, some EU bureaucrats may have colluded with certain pharmaceutical companies. Otherwise, why would the EU have waived its right to sue manufacturers in the event of late delivery? According to the left-wing “narrative news portal” Politico, EU treaties do not reflect trade logic and contain ridiculous mistakes. Maybe that is why the agreements were made secret. Thus, the fastest pharmaceutical companies are announcing one after the other that, due to some kind of transparent objections, they will not be able to deliver the EU shipments on time. Meanwhile, other countries receive enormous orders of vaccines. The British must really be delighted now that they left the EU because their government made much more successful contracts.

Thus, we arrive to the point where the golem has turned against its creators. It is not enough that Europe has fallen way behind due to weak contracts, but they are also getting deeper into an economic crisis and thousands of people are dying every day. And the countries that try to buy vaccines from elsewhere – like China and Russia – are threatened and punished. They threaten governments that prioritize the lives and security of their own citizens over the EU verdict. Moreover, they try to hold you accountable for how much you bought the vaccines for. Meanwhile, behind closed doors in Brussels and based on closed contracts ignoring prior agreements, they unequally distribute the slowly arriving, limited vaccine amounts.

We are now at a state where the British, Americans, and Israelis have more vaccinated by order of magnitude. And the Hungarian government is attacked because it is going at a much faster rate, saving lives with the help of Russian and Chinese vaccines.

We must also be aware that the economic and political winners of this health crisis will be the fastest and smartest states. The rest will unfortunately fall behind. Hungary cannot slow down – the more vaccines, the faster vaccinations, the more we win. We can consider the fate of the golem afterwards.

The author is security policy consultant for the Center for Fundamental Rights