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Originally Posted by 1andrew1
Heard Johnson today claim that vaccines were approved quicker due to Brexit. I can understand why he is seeking some tangible benefits of Brexit. A remind that the facts don't back him up, courtesy of the fact-checkers at Full Fact.
Vaccine approval isn’t quicker because of Brexit
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And a reminder that there is more to the EU than its regulations. A number of EU countries were pursuing independent vaccine procurement before the EU scheme got up and running. All of them agreed to halt their independent efforts in order to join the EU scheme. None of them had to, but at the level of the Council of Ministers, much is achieved by consensus and there is always a very high degree of political pressure used in pursuit of it.
It is highly unlikely that the UK would have been politically able to pursue an independent vaccine procurement policy had we still been in the EU at that time, regardless of the letter of the law.
That said, none of this is surprising to me. The political reach of the EU is one of the things us real long-term Eurosceptics warned about for decades, while even now it’s something many hardline remainers simply can’t, or won’t, see.