For those who have become accustomed to see the British as the bad boys of Europe, constantly in trouble, lurching from one crisis to the next and blaming everyone except themselves, the

past few days of the pandemic should have been an eye-opener. Suddenly, on the key issue of vaccination, the roles of the UK and the EU have been reversed.  Last week the European Commission

seemed to go into meltdown: threatening a “jab war”, triggering the Brexit nuclear option, thereby putting the Good Friday Agreement in jeopardy, before doing an abrupt about-turn. Even

Tony Blair, the architect of that agreement and the most Europhile Prime Minister we have ever had, was dismayed. Now Loyalists in Northern Ireland are impeding checks on goods arriving from

infallible.” Who would have thought Europeans would ever be nostalgic for the Falstaffian era of Jean-Claude Juncker? Meanwhile, both President Macron and Chancellor Merkel have been making

ill-informed, unscientific criticisms of the British vaccination programme, despite the rather obvious fact that its remarkable rapidity has put their own paltry efforts in the shade. For

the first time in years, envious eyes are being cast across the Channel. It makes no sense for Macron to sneer at the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine as “quasi-ineffective” for the over-65s, nor

for Merkel to question the validity of the authorisation process of the UK regulators, when the Commission is desperate to get its hands on more of the stuff and their own populations are

left unvaccinated and exposed to the coronavirus. The European regulator has now anyway licensed the Oxford vaccine for all age groups and there is no reason to doubt that it is highly

effective among the elderly. Given the fact that resistance to vaccination is still strong across the Continent, for the EU’s two most powerful leaders to raise such doubts just before their

compatriots receive the jab seems, well, quasi-Trumpian. By far the most successful vaccination programme in the world has, of course, been in Israel, which has now given well over half its

population their first jabs. The Jewish State has thereby provided the world with a laboratory in which to observe the impact of vaccination on Covid. So far, the evidence shows that a

single jab has provided over 90 per cent immunity among the over-60s. This suggests that in prioritising the first jab the British were right to follow the Israeli example — and other

Europeans would do well to follow suit, rather than carping and criticising. With more than half of over-70s now vaccinated, the UK programme, too, is beginning to slow down the spread of

Covid, with a sharp fall in new cases and hospitalisations now showing up in the rolling averages. The big threat to progress comes from new mutations — which have mostly been revealed by

British genome experts. Britain’s relatively open borders have been our Achilles’ heel throughout the pandemic. It has emerged that Sage warned the Prime Minister a week ago to impose strict

hotel quarantine on visitors to prevent the highly contagious South African variant from entering the country. We do not yet know how widespread in the community this variant is, but the

Government has moved swiftly to test those in postcodes where cases have been detected. House to house searches will upset some as an infringement of civil liberties, but the stakes are

high; most people will support such measures as a temporary expedient. Overall, the situation in which the UK finds itself is far better than seemed likely a month ago. The Government is on

track to protect all the over-70s, the vulnerable, NHS staff and care home workers by mid-February. The second wave of the pandemic, though more virulent than the first, has been contained

without hospitals being overwhelmed. The death toll, now more than 107,000, is of course horrific, but far lower than it would have been without huge improvements in medical care and

prophylactic measures, including lockdown, social distancing and vaccination. There is light at the end of this seemingly interminable tunnel — on this side of the Channel, at least. It is

too soon to talk about lifting the lockdown, let alone summer holidays, but one thing has become clearer. Whether on procurement or distribution of vaccines, the British Government seems to

know what it is doing. In the EU, vaccination has been chaotic. Whatever may happen now to trade and services, in political terms the argument about Brexit is over. A MESSAGE FROM THEARTICLE

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