by Rossano Salini |
It would be of great benefit to those who are now governing the increasingly tired and desolate European Union to re-read and understand the reasons behind such a provocative text as Bernard de Mandeville 's satirical poem "The Fable of the Bees". The Dutch poet imagined that the life of a beehive, in which, alongside a certain prosperity and a general hard-working prosperity, there were at the same time various social inequalities and widespread dishonesty, was at a certain point disrupted by a radical revolution of the probs: led by a demagogue, who until the day before had been the first of the profiteers, the people of the bees asked and obtained from Jupiter a system based on honesty and justice.
In the new society, which had abandoned everything superfluous with great righteousness, work began to become increasingly scarce and many bees were forced to leave the hive, which gradually became depopulated until it was completely deserted and abandoned. The author of the paradoxical apologue concluded, with a provocative and scandalous maxim, that 'vice is as necessary in a flourishing state as hunger is necessary to compel us to eat. It is impossible that virtue alone should ever make a nation famous and glorious'.
The failure of the European Union
Why is it that de Mandeville's message, despite being over three hundred years old, retains its originality and modernity, especially today, in the context of the general and dramatic European failure on the Covid and vaccine front? Bernard de Mandeville's work is also linked to a scandalous statement, later retracted, by the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who in a closed-door meeting with Conservative MPs, allegedly let slip the following statement: "The reason we have the success of the vaccine is because of capitalism, because of greed, my friends".
Johnson, the leader of the very nation that - after leaving the EU while the continent's mainstream press was sounding the trumpets of the Apocalypse and imagining Britain's impending doom - surprisingly outclassed Europe on the vaccine issue, earning an early 'release' from the restrictions that are killing our economy, has since retracted those words. He said he regretted them, and asked us not to consider them. But, like it or not, has revealed a great truth, that the bureaucratic Europe, truncated in affirming theoretical principles and in pursuing rigid procedures, has not considered: that in the tragedy of deaths for Covid and the social and economic drama of the restrictions, we had to cut corners and be very pragmatic in negotiations with the big pharmaceutical companies, manufacturers of vaccines. The maximum possible result had to be achieved immediately and at any cost. Pragmatic nations such as Israel, Great Britain and the USA did not waver on this, and the results are now being seen; sanctimonious Europe, entangled in its own rigid bureaucratic formalism, negotiated instead with the pharmaceutical companies, looking down on them, placing a series of rigid bureaucratic constraints, and obtaining as a result a total and disastrous failure across the board, with consequent delays paid for dearly by the European population.
The vaccine affair, with its disastrous consequences, is a sort of tombstone for the European Union. It is now clear that the total inadequacy of the methods governing the Brussels institutions is condemning what was once the world's leading continent to being the new third world, squeezed between the forces of the Anglo-Saxon and Eastern worlds. The European Union of bureaucrats, both in the central institutions and in the individual heads of state of the various nations, has got it all wrong: it has set up a totally bankrupt plan behind the mantra of "free vaccine for all", and has managed communication on the subject in a disastrous and scandalous way, especially around the well-known AstraZeneca case. Deaths, hospitalisations and a devastating economic crisis are the consequences left in the field.
The case of the AstraZeneca vaccine
The case mentioned above is also AstraZeneca is also particularly significant for understanding the situation that has arisen. Beyond the issue of communication, which should be studied in textbooks as a prime example of what not to do (a fear and mistrust has been created throughout Europe that is absolutely and radically unjustified, irresponsibly generated by the European and national authorities), what is most surprising is the fact that it was precisely the emblem of the humanitarian and non-profit vaccine that fell victim to the same mechanism that led to the destruction of Mandeville's hive.
The anti-profit rhetoric has in fact crushed the Anglo-Swedish company's project under the weight of shortcomings and incapacity: wanting to produce a low-cost vaccine for the whole world and even for poor countries is a very noble project, but if you don't take your production capacity into account, you end up not only failing in your noble idea, but also becoming incapable of respecting contracts (except for those with your own country which, 'greedily', had already grabbed the pre-emption). Pfizer e Modern decided instead to prioritise profits, giving the vaccines straight away to those who paid the most for them. As ancient folk wisdom teaches us, the best is the enemy of the good. And the vaccines case is proving it.
The consequences of European policies
Now all that remains is to hope that the weight of the mistakes made and the accumulated delays will become a spur for a rapid solution, at least in the immediate future, so that Europe does not fail in its basic objective, that is, to arrive at least at a widespread vaccination campaign by the autumn of this year, so as to avoid a new season of closures for next winter, after the summer will presumably bring a general improvement in the situation as happened last year. But beyond the fact that a patch can be put in place at the last minute, and that we can salvage what can be saved, the fact of the mistakes made in recent months remains and will continue to weigh like a boulder. Europe is no longer itself: behind the blanket of abstract principles and rigid formalities, it implements policies that until yesterday we could criticise as simply wrong or ineffective; today, while we see that those structural defects do not change even in the face of hospital admissions and deaths from Covid, we understand that those policies are also fraught with tragic consequences. An irreversible process that will increasingly condemn our continent to marginality in the coming decades.
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