It's not one way though. The bizarre stuff from people claiming that the UK had stolen a march on the EU because of Brexit, the 'Britain leading the charge against disease' (for a jointly funded and researched vaccine), the 'we signed our deal first' (so what?) silliness, blocking intellectual property for vaccines (I know the EU were also opposed until recently).
Much if the anger directed at the EU is exactly what some would herald as 'Britain looking after itself' or 'statesmanlike' behaviour if it were to come from the PM.
Equally so, you'd have the same people who are fully backing the EU now be criticising the UK government if they were doing what they're doing..
And - I know this isn't an EU matter - how do you think they'd react if they announced lockdown restrictions and then under 24 hours later did a U-turn, like Merkel has. Or if BJ had said, without any evidence, like Macron, that a vaccine was "quasi-ineffective"?
You're spot on, it all works both ways.
The contract point was quite key. The UK didn't actually sign the deal before, but - for whatever reason, maybe because of the ties with Oxford Uni? – the AZ factories in the UK did start up 3 months before the ones in the EU. That's a long time, in this process which would normally take a decade quashed down to 10-12 months.
Clearly fault on both sides of AZ/EU argument. I'm not sure in this case much blame can be directed at the UK government in terms of them signing deals which put the UK's best interests first. And I don't blame any country or the EU Commission doing that. It's how they've gone about it since then that irks me.
It's a crap system which needs changing, massively. I wouldn't trust our useless sods to do that, though. I would have backed a Corbyn party to do it, but well, we know how that turned out.
