Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.
Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
- Christopher Howse: 'A Pilgrim in Spain'*
Living La Vida Loca in Galicia/Spain
Xmas gatherings: 17 different regions and 2 'enclaves' (not colonies!) in Africa. So, 1p sets of rules. See here on this.
A got a message from DHL Express - not the same as DHL - re what I think is my old passport, coming back next week. In this they say they aim to answer emails within 5 days. Not 5 hours but 5 DAYS . . . Does this really count as prompt service in Spain? The UK Passport Office - a busy place - offers 3 days.
Here's María's Riding The Wave: Day 40
The UK
The reaction to the UK being the first country to identify - not have - the new Covid strain reminds me of the 1917/8 'flu being labelled Spanish 'flu, simply because there was no embargo in the media here on talking about it. Unlike in all the countries embroiled in a war, with morale to worry about.
The UK & The EU
So, it looks like one of the 'final, final deadlines' for a deal turns out to be genuine. Who'd have thought it?
The EU
But not everything is coming up roses. See below for some Xmas gloom below for Brussels, from our old friend, Casandra, aka Ambrose Evans Pritchard.
The USA/Nutters Corner
Some atheists choose not to tell their kids that Santa Claus exist because it’s technically telling them a lie. 'Vision America' founder and pastor Rick Scarborough feels the same way, but his fear is that the same logic kids use to show Santa doesn’t exist will eventually be used against God. And also, SANTA and SATAN contain the same letters.
The Way of the World
Perhaps one of the silver linings of 2020 is the revelation that it is not the people who are going mad, but the world itself. Society is sick, suspended between the eras of the life-loving baby boomers and a perverse new desire to abolish death. Next year, the challenge will be to muster the strength to try and restore some sanity to the planet, at the same time as heal ourselves.
Finally . . .
This might just work . . .
THE ARTICLE
Europe’s vaccination fiasco threatens to become the EU's biggest failure.
The politicisation by Brussels of Covid vaccines is turning into an economic and political black swan event - with a huge price to pay: Ambrose Evans-Pritchard The Telegraph
The EU’s politicisation of Covid vaccines is turning into an economic and political black swan event. There will be a price to pay as the consequences of this profound failure unfold in 2021, and an even higher price as people start to understand why it happened.
Europe’s double-dip recession will be stretched out for another quarter. Recovery will be delayed until the second half of the year.
Thousands more companies will be pushed over the brink, threatening a cascade of defaults and raising the risk of systemic solvency across the banking nexus. Labour scarring will run deeper. Public debt ratios across the Club Med bloc will move closer to the point of no return.
It is by now widely known that the European Medicines Agency wasted two critical weeks after the UK, Canada and even America’s notoriously cautious FDA had approved the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine. The agency would have wasted another week had there not been furious complaints from Berlin.
The Commission’s insistence that all EU states should then launch the vaccine at the same time after Christmas has lost yet more critical days. Germans have been subjected to the surreal spectacle of trial drills by their well-organised vaccination machine when they could have been doing the real thing. They cannot yet receive a jab made by their own start-up group BioNTech.
“Germany has bet on Europe, and lost heavily (krachend verloren),” was the headline across Die Zeit, with a pointed picture of a woman in Cardiff being vaccinated while along with a caption declaring that Germans must wait such deliverance.
The Netherlands has compounded the error by so mishandling its software preparations that it will not start vaccinating until Jan 8. If you think Boris Johnson has had a bad pandemic, take a look at Dutch wunderkind Mark Rutte. Listen to the volcanic exchanges in the Tweede Kamer.
But these delays pale compared to what is coming next year. The European vaccine alliance has failed in its one overriding purpose: it neglected the job of acquiring vaccines. Germany has just 400,000 doses of the BioNTech jab and may not receive more than 3m or 4m by late January, rising to a total of 11m to 13m by the end of March. Berlin has taken matters into its own hands and belatedly ordered more for the future but the damage is done.
A devastating report by investigative journalists at Der Spiegel entitled “The Planning Disaster” pulls away the curtain on the ineptitude of the European Commission, which drifted through the summer with much self-gratulation but little action.
Other countries ordered early, and ordered wide. Brussels picked a mix of vaccines that mostly will not be ready until the second half of 2021 at the earliest. It failed to lock in a firm order for the BioNTech jab until mid-November, long after it was already clear that this messenger RNA vaccine was a front-runner.
Even then it declined the full offer of 500m doses for the EU27. The Commission ordered just 200m, with an option for 100m more. It also turned down most of the offer from Moderna, the other mRNA front-runner.
According to Der Spiegel there had to be parity with Sanofi’s "French vaccine", which has since gone badly awry and is unlikely to come on stream before the end of 2021. "Buying more from a German company wasn't in the cards,” said one source.
You can interpret this as a case of European ideology and political correctness running amok, but there is an even worse construction: the Commission seems to have intervened in the interests of one commercial company, spending public funds corruptly in violation of its own competition law.
“Dramatic consequences are brewing for the German government,” said Der Spiegel. “Without being able to vaccinate on a broad scale, the country won’t be able to stop the virus. Which means that the fall and winter of 2021 could be similar to this year, with high infection rates, contact restrictions and lockdowns.”
Analysts at Eurointelligence go even further: “The combination of a delay of vaccine approval and a procurement policy under suspicion of prioritising producer interest would be a shock from which the EU would struggle to recover. From now onwards, Covid deaths may be EU deaths.”
In my view we are heading into a year where German popular support for the European Project will be stress-tested like never before. Two grave matters will intersect. It will become clear to all that the fundamental health security of the country has been endangered by EU politics. At the same time, monetary union will go through another spasm of tension.
Europe’s leaders have oversold the €750bn recovery fund as a springboard for Keynesian reflation. It is spread too thinly over five years to move the macroeconomic needle. Almost half of the money is in the form of loans that may never be used - except in extremis - because of the Troika-like conditions attached.
Budget plans in southern Europe suggest that much of the grant component displaces money that would have been spent anyway and therefore adds no net fiscal stimulus. Yet a third wave of Covid and further rolling lockdowns, now unavoidable, means that the overall fiscal package will have to be greater.
There is already talk sotto voce that the recovery fund will need to be much larger to avert lasting economic damage. If so, it means telling German and northern European taxpayers that they will have to dig deeper into their pockets to fund even greater transfers to the South.
The European Central Bank can shut down the price signals in the sovereign debt markets for a while longer by soaking up the bond issuance of Italy, Spain, Portugal, and indeed France, but the longer it does so, the clearer it is that the ECB is conducting fiscal policy and propping up insolvent sovereign states in breach of EU treaty law.
While the latest programme of pandemic QE lasts in principle until March 2022, the problems will surface before then. German public opinion and part of the economics professoriate will react once there are first flickers of inflation, which will occur around Easter for mechanical "base-effect" reasons and because of commodity supply constraints. You can dress up QE as an emergency tool for fighting deflation. How do you explain it if prices are rising briskly?
For now attention is on Britain’s particular travails but this is unlikely to last. Scientists working in the UK discovered and tracked the B.1.1.7 mutation because this country has done almost as much genome sequencing of Covid-19 as the rest of the world combined. As Nervtag said in its report, this mutation was particularly hard to sequence.
Covid-19 Genomics UK Consortium (COG-UK) makes these sequences available to international science, a big contribution to the global fight against the pandemic that is little appreciated in lay circles. You certainly would not know this from some of the abuse being hurled at Britain.
Italy’s health adviser Walter Ricciardi descended to inexcusable depths in suggesting that the UK knew about the virus in September (it did not not: the sample was collected in September, one of thousands of mutations) and has since engaged in a Wuhanesque cover-up.
It is possible that the mutation came from Italy in the first place for all we know. It might have come from the treatment of an immuno-compromised patient in the UK treated with neutralising antibodies, but we can’t be sure. It is too early to reach any conclusion.
The larger point is that the UK acts as Europe’s viral antennae. There has been more Covid sequencing from Wales than from the whole of France. Once EU states carry out full surveillance of the mutant strain they may discover that it has long been circulating on the Continent, explaining the parabolic surges that have caught so many governments off guard over recent weeks.
The great irony is that only the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine will be available soon enough and at a larger enough scale to prevent a disaster for Europe over the next six months. The mutation makes it even more urgent. “Right now, whether Germany fares well or not hinges on the AstraZeneca vaccine,” says Karl Lauterbach, health chief for the German Social Democrats.
The vaccine will almost certainly be approved in the UK the week after Christmas. The European Medicines Agency will have to decide whether to swallow its pride and accept an accursed product of this apostate island. My guess is that it will drag feet for faux procedural reasons until public opinion and the German Chancellor force the issue.
Whatever happens, it is going to be a very difficult time for Europe. People will notice as the UK conducts several million vaccinations a week all through January in a massive operation that draws on the best of the NHS and the British armed forces. There will be the same images in America, Canada, and elsewhere.
They will ask why the doses are being dribbled out so desperately slowly across the Continent, and when that happens Brussels will struggle to offer a credible answer. If EU elites don’t yet realise that this is going to mushroom into one of the biggest failures in the history of the European Project, they will find out soon enough.
* A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant.