The "report" has a by line of "Michael V" so I suppose technically he did but ALL his "information" comes from Gunnar Beck. It is therefore Mr Beck who is responsible for the claims.

For the avoidance of doubt any comments in response to a previous post are directed to its ideas and not at any, or all, posters personally.

That's just a very tedious excuse used by Brexiteers to try to justify the deception after it was exposed.

There is no doubt at all that the claim was simply a marketing tool designed by Cummings to deceive the voters. Any politician with an ounce of integrity renounced it at the time.

For the avoidance of doubt any comments in response to a previous post are directed to its ideas and not at any, or all, posters personally.

I have no idea how factual the claims are but they could be true couldn’t they? If so facts are facts regardless of the source.

One barometer of wether leaving the E.U.was right is the London Stock Exchange, it is flying upwards since leaving, another is the vaccine success story.

You do have a point. However, there's no hiding the fact that the two best performing economies are Britain and the USA, largely caused by investor confidence. The EU vaccine response is a shambles. Let's also be honest, this latest EU bailout will not be enough and Britain would have been contributing to it.
750bn will not cover Italy, let alone Spain, France and Portugal. That's if the Germans don't have enough of paying for everyone else. The reason we're not hearing anything from the EU is exactly this. They look stupid and there's a massive groundswell against them in all of the EU countries.

Red and Blue Army!

I think this vaccine issue goes beyond just the hows and whys around procurement. What has staggered me is how many EU countries, once they have the vaccines, seem so slack in how they approach the actual mechanisms of getting the stuff into peoples arms.

Lots of these countries do not vaccinate on Sundays, took May 1st off and a whole host of other ways of not actually distributing it.

Like there Governments are institutionally unable to cope with a crisis.

The UK's vaccine success goes way beyond just the fact that we managed to get our hands on sufficient amounts. For me, it speaks of a vastly different cultural approach to such dilema's that puts us at odds with the wider European cultural norms and expectations.

Now the reality is that I suspect we would have probably gone our own way anyway from the EU no matter what, primarily based on our links with Oxford/Astra Zeneca along with our infrastructure differences in terms of the NHS and so on. And that if we had still been in the EU, might have taken a leading role in sorting it out so it might have been more efficient anyway (this I concede is one of the great 'what if's' but lets get it out there anyway).

The UK approached Covid, after some early and tragic mistakes, as effectively a wartime situation. And we threw any and everything at it. The EU by contrast are simply not capable of doing that, its very nature of compromise and technocratic rule meaning that it simply cannot see anything in such a binary way. Covid was seen, and still is, as primarily a political issue. And thus they handled it as they handle everything else. Zero urgency and when it all goes wrong, desperately trying to blame everybody else.

And let's not forget their general incompetence. For example when they published their contract with Astra-Zeneca, their failure to ensure that the redacted parts that contradicted what they were claiming in public to remain redacted. Schoolboy errors. Not what you expect from such a supposedly genius body of Europe's elite politicians.

Covid was beyond the EU's grasp on a myriad of levels. It should never have been near dealing with it in any way, shape or form.

"The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command." - 1984 - George Orwell.