[London, 14 Jan 2021]

In April 2020, in the first of a series of articles on the covid-19 pandemic, Lessons from a Pandemic, I lamented China’s sadly predictable duplicity and the lack of preparedness and any meaningful response coordination from the White House, the WHO and the EU.

As I then wrote, “the EU has proved to be largely incompetent and impotent at this time of crisis. This is acutely illuminating in this year of Brexit. The EU in fact, acting under China’s diplomatic pressure led by Zhang Ming, China’s envoy to the EU, had been wickedly complicit in delaying and redacting its own report into China’s coronavirus disinformation campaign in fear of damaging trade relations.”

I then contrasted this opaque inertia with the agile ground-up mobilisation of industry and academia, which embraced and accelerated multi-disciplinary innovation through new research paradigms, rapid upscaling and global digital collaboration.

It does not give me any satisfaction to reflect that in these last nine months not much has changed. The White House is now under a different type of siege and has dropped any residual pretence of federal coordination altogether. Having spent months destroying and fabricating evidence, China continues to coerce the wickedly compliant WHO, demanding its investigators absolve it of any blame for originating the pandemic.

Other than booking this largely symbolic jaunt to Wuhan, the WHO remains shamefully AWOL and Brussels has spent more energy on pursuing British fish than lifesaving vaccines for its people. And Bono is nowhere to be seen. As a consequence, despite an unprecedented leap in vaccinology, the world is falling ever deeper into the grip of the deadly pandemic.

Brussels remains as pitifully inept in expediting EU regulatory approvals, as it is in organising the legal framework and delivery logistics of vaccines for its desperate populations. In a behind-the-scenes standoff, the European Commission, eager post-Brexit to showcase to its long suffering taxpayers that it's still relevant, fights fiercely to maintain exclusive control over all vaccine procurement, banning individual nations from sourcing their own supplies.

The result of this EU obstinacy? Post-Brexit UK has vaccinated as many people today as France has managed in total. We have vaccinated six times the cohort of people per 100 of population as Germany or Poland. Desperate Netherlands only got around to their first jab a week ago and have now achieved 0.32 doses per 100 population, just slightly worse than Belgium, but a staggering seventeen times worse than us.

While the bureaucrats argue, local health chiefs are resigning in protest and national politicians grow increasingly terrified as their local death tolls rise. Denmark and others are now attempting to bypass the Commission altogether. Some of my EU friends have been appealing to me to help them come over to London to get vaccinated here.

The Spectator sums it up well, "Vaccine-gate, as it is starting to be known in Germany and elsewhere, is turning into a rerun of the euro crisis. The EU, as so often, wills the ends but then hopelessly fails to put together the means to deliver them. It created a single currency with none of the mechanisms in place to make it work. This time around it has created a health policy, but without the budgets or expertise to deliver."

Free people, freely self-organising within a light-touch governance framework, have now delivered 3 different approved vaccines in the UK. We have administered over 3 million jabs already, with more that 415k of these in England being already the second dose, which maximises immune protection.

Only two weeks after the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement, with all its theatre over fish, our ability to succeed outside of the hegemony of EU neocolonialists appears hardly the disaster that they had wished it to be.

In these catastrophic times it would be grossly insensitive of me to come across as a nationalist and I am truly not one, now or ever. It's just that it makes me angry seeing my sisters and brothers across Europe being so tragically betrayed by these supranational institutions that were created supposedly to provide for and protect them. 

I have been predicting for over 25 years now that should a major crisis hit Europe, one which required an agile response, the EU would fail ignominiously. The WHO and the EU are both outdated and failed paradigms that should not outlive the pandemic. They are both examples of creaking mainframes in a world of cloud and need scrapping.

Our destiny should not be dictated top-down by failed bureaucracies, but instead delivered bottom-up through innovation, driven by self-organising, lean, agile, diverse and digital collaboration networks.

For me, this is an enduring lesson from this tragic pandemic. 

Dr Piotr Ney is an energetic promoter of innovation, digital transformation, customer and operational excellence, and sustainability, with some thirty five years of change leadership, consultancy and senior executive experience. He has an MBA in International Business and a PhD in Economics and Management, lectures part-time in Innovation Management and Disruptive Strategy and is a popular speaker at global business events. Piotr works in London and internationally as an independent consultant and educator.

Copyright © 2021 by Piotr Ney. All rights reserved. No part of this article may be published, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the author.