An outbreak of the new Omicron coronavirus variant in Southern Africa is boosting critics of the EU, who say that Brussels is preventing a quick roll-out of jabs across poor nations by zealously defending vaccine patents.
The European Commission always knew that this was going to be a tough week, in which its trade officials risked being politically isolated as Big Pharma's top allies in a debate over waiving intellectual property on vaccines at a World Trade Organization summit in Geneva.
Ultimately, the WTO summit had to be postponed because of Omicron, but that doesn't mean EU diplomats can breathe a sigh of relief that they are suddenly off the hook. Quite the reverse. Advocates of wider vaccine access are immediately leaping on the new variant and the cancellation of the WTO event as evidence that rich countries cannot hope to beat the virus unless developing nations have blanket vaccination too.
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