No-deal Brexit could see Covid vaccines held up at Channel ports – Vladimir McTavish

A week ago, the news that a vaccine for coronavirus would be available by the start of December would have seemed like a fantasy. Yet, here we are, days away from the first vaccinations in Scotland, due to start on Tuesday.

Lorries practise queuing a few miles north of Dover in preparation for the end of the Brexit transition period (Picture: Glyn Kirk/AFP via Getty Images)

Some are sceptical that this can happen so quickly, but public figures have been keen to show their support. There has been a call for celebrities to be seen taking a jab, in the same way as Elvis Pressley took a polio injection in the 1950s. Not the best role model, with hindsight. He may never have contracted polio, but he was hardly the picture of health and died when he was 42.

Nicola Surgeon has said that she would be prepared to take the vaccine on live television if it helped encourage others.

Likewise, UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock has said that he too would be prepared to take his jab in public “if it were to save lives”. However, I’m reckoning this was a slip of the tongue, and that he meant to say he would do so “if it were to save my job”.

For months, Hancock has worn the expression of someone who is worried that they may have left the house without turning off the gas. This week, on announcing that the Pfizer vaccine had been approved, he bore the relieved look of a Monopoly player who has just landed on Chance and picked up a Get Out Of Jail Free card. Or of a driver who has finally managed to pull into the motorway services before their bladder gives up on them.

However, I suspect the beleaguered minister may not be out of the woods yet. While the first doses of the drug will be rolled out before Christmas, it will be well into 2021 before mass supplies arrive from the Pfizer storage facility in Belgium. And therein could lie the problem.

Yes, it is coming from Belgium, a member of the European Union, and the bulk of supplies crossing the Channel will be scheduled for the months after the UK has left the EU. And the way things look right now, we could be leaving with no trade deal.

In which case, all the phials of the much-trumpeted vaccine could be held up for weeks in lorry parks, or stuck in 40-mile traffic jams. Then they have to make it through the endless customs checks and paperwork that will exist on each side of the Channel if this blundering, feckless government continues trying to play hardball with the EU and Britain crashes out of Europe without a deal on Hogmanay.

Perhaps this will provide the necessary kick up the backside that Boris Johnson needs over the coming weeks. In his 18 months in office, the Prime Minister has proved himself to be devious, dishonest and stubborn. However, surely even he is not such a buffoon that he would put the lives of millions at risk by playing a potentially lethal game of Russian roulette.

We’ll all find out the answer to that in January. Those of us who are still alive by then, that is.

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