Blocking Australia’s supply was an easy win for Italy’s new PM - Sydney Morning Herald

More than a year after Italy endured Europe’s first coronavirus outbreak, the nation is still besieged by the virus.

Another 1696 people died last week, tipping the nation’s toll past 98,000 — second only to Britain in Europe. Its epidemiologists have called on its latest government coalition to introduce another hard nationwide lockdown to stem yet another wave of infections.

Prime Minister Mario Draghi has been in the job for three weeks, taking control after Giuseppe Conti resigned when his coalition collapsed in a dispute over COVID-19 response.

The hard-headed former boss of the European Central Bank, ‘Super Mario’ as he is known on the Continent has staked his reputation on fixing his nation’s vaccination crisis, recruiting an army general field-tested in Afghanistan to shake up a sclerotic rollout of doses to the nation’s regions. Only 70 per cent of the vaccines distributed so far have been administered, and in impoverished Calabria and hardest hit Lombardy, it’s even worse. More than two months after the first jab on December 27, only 2.48 per cent of the population is fully vaccinated.

But Italy is not going begging for supply. Of the 1.5 million AstraZeneca doses it has received, it has given only 350,000 doses. (The bulk of its vaccinations so far have been Pfizer’s.)

It is true that the 250,000 doses that Draghi blocked from shipment to Australia were packaged near Rome, but these were not part of the Italian stockpile. These were separate doses made to fulfil the order Australia put in last year.

Mario Draghi has staked his reputation on fixing Italy’s vaccination rollout. Credit:AP

At his first meeting of European leaders last month, Draghi urged the union to clamp down on exports — as the United States has done — to boost supply and unlock curfew-weary Europe.

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Australia’s shipment has been seized as a show of strength in the European Union’s dispute with AstraZeneca over the speed and quantity of the doses shipped to the Continent. This dispute is made worse by the vaccine’s image problem in Europe, where leaders such as France’s Emmanuel Macron have openly doubted its efficacy and Germany is considering donating unwanted doses to the homeless.

According to Italian daily La Repubblica, Draghi told European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Wednesday that they needed to “suffocate” Big Pharma to make them deliver on their contractual obligations.

So he could look at Australia, where infection rates are in single digits and authorities are confident our local production can make up the shortfall, and see an easy way to make his point, claiming he’s saved the vaccines for poor Italy.

That isn’t the case — those doses will be shared around 27 countries — but Draghi, abetted by the approval of the EU, can look like he’s doing something, even if the real challenge is the hidebound bureaucracy and poor practices in his own backyard.

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2021-03-05 06:13:16Z
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