The lack if strategic thinking, and subjugation by the US, of Germany has been made painfully clear with the Covid vaccine. While the UK made sure that the Oxford vaccine went to British pharma, the German let Pfizer take over BioNTech's vaccine.
BionTech needed a large partner for clinical trials and initial prodcution. The IP is still largely Biontech, they now have a significant production footprint as well. Not to bad, plus huge global sales. And the mRNA know-how mostly stayed with Biontech. For once I don't see any lack in strategy here.
Germany has large pharma companies and could have made sure one of them was picked in the same way the UK did.
Plainly, this was a war situation with countries brought to their knees and Germany handed production of a key weapon that they had developed to a foreign entity. In such a situation IP means nothing if you don't control the factories. Compare to the UK who very clearly understood the situation and intervened. That's serious lack of sovereign strategy and assertiveness on Germany's part, but, again, I don't think they are willing to, or even can, say 'no' to the US.
Yes and AZ fumbled the clinical tests (still not approved by the FDA) and production (not "their fault" to be fair, they had little experience in vaccines, and the viral vector ones are hard to scale up).
Pfizer seems to be much more on point on the fabrication and regulatory aspects, it was a much needed partner.
Germany got through the pandemic with about half as many infections and deaths per capita as the UK. The vaccination rates are almost the same as the UK by now.
So I wouldn't call this a great strategic victory for the UK. Especially since it also cost them quite a bit of goodwill in Europe.
All the blaming of the UK seems to have been really blatant scapegoating that went unchallenged because it fit with what the media wanted people to believe, though. The UK suffered the same shortfall in yield of the AstraZeneca vaccine as everywhere else, though to a slightly lesser extent early on as the production line here got funded earlier and the early teething troubles sorted out sooner. We were also far more reliant on the AZ vaccine than the EU, as they themselves liked to point out in order to argue they actually did a good job. This meant the yield and blood clot issues had a much bigger impact here. The UK government just did a far better job of limiting the impact of this by ordering more vaccines early on, basing their rollout on what AZ could actually deliver, and better public communications about the safety of the vaccine. There's no reason the EU couldn't have done the same other than their own decisions - AZ was quite keen to set up larger-scale manufacturing for the EU, and they could easily have negotiated a provision like the UK's requiring timely notice of how much vaccine would actually be delivered. They just didn't because they didn't seem to understand why this was necessary.
