Europeans, like many others across the world, hoped for a better and happier year in 2021 – after seemingly endless months of Covid illness, deaths and pandemic-linked economic misery.
But so far, so annus horribilis for the EU. On a number of Covid fronts.
The bloc’s by now infamous vaccination procurement scheme – trumpeting the securing of up to 2.6 billion doses – has so far failed to deliver. EU countries lag significantly behind Israel, the UK and the US in getting jabs into arms.
A number of EU members have stumbled nationally, too, with heavily criticised roll-outs of the vaccines they did manage to obtain, in Germany, Belgium, Bulgaria and beyond.