The fuel injected Brexiter comments on the EU's vaccine problems miss many points.

1) no-one wanted to get out of the EU or the single market to protect ourselves better against a pandemic. See Brexit Tory controlled government policy 2016-2020 regarding the NHS and pandemic preparedness.

2) we could have, and, perhaps thanks to the need to genuflect to nationalists, or out of pragmatic needs, chosen to go our own way on procurement even within the EU.

3) none of this explains why it's good to be outside the single market, restricting our trade and making us poorer.

4) the implicit celebration of the vaccine nationalist cause, seemingly [but not actually] permitted by Brexit, ignores how this game plays out, namely:

@bbclaurak asks what went wrong. Many things....

1. The government and particularly the PM was complacent in getting into gear as the virus gathered pace in China and Italy.

2. The March lockdown came far too late. A fault that may lie with the govt and the scientists advising; perhaps the latter were incorrectly assuming a lockdown would not be agreed to and so did not recommend it early enough.

3. The first lockdown was arguably too stringent and inefficient, and possibly even too long. IMO it was a reasonable precautionary design. But a case can be made.

4. Test trace isolate was a total disaster. Including the hiccoughs developing the app[s], and the non digital side of the operation. Time spent lockdown, and enjoying low transmission in Summer, was wasted.