The UN General Assembly in September last year was a pivotal moment in the pandemic, when leaders began to show some unity as global deaths approached a million. They had learned hard lessons from the damage that hoarding protective equipment had done, they said. When a vaccine was developed, the world’s most vulnerable would be first in line, they claimed.
The vaccines are now here and that solidarity has frayed.
Between the United Kingdom and the European Union, it has disappeared entirely and given way to an all-out battle over who is more entitled to tens of millions of doses produced by British-Swedish drugmaker AstraZeneca. Meanwhile, many countries in the global south have yet to administer a single vaccine.
The ugly vaccine nationalism that the World Health Organization and other public health advocates feared is here. And it’s beginning in Europe, the region that usually boasts the world’s greatest levels of equality by many measures.
The spat revolves around the EU’s deal with AstraZeneca, which recently informed the bloc it would not be able to supply the number of vaccines the EU had hoped for by the end of March. EU leaders are furious that the company appears to be fulfilling its deliveries for the U.K. market and not theirs.
And while the EU’s complaints are largely directed at AstraZeneca, the dispute has triggered animosity on both sides of the Channel, the two sides having only just emerged from four years of bickering over the terms of their Brexit divorce.
On Friday, Brussels imposed controls on vaccine exports to keep track of how many doses were leaving the continent and where they were going, in what leaders called a transparency measure but what looks like a targeted export ban.
“The measure is not targeting any specific country,” European Commission Executive Vice-President Valdis Dombrovskis said during a press briefing in Brussels. But as he announced the measure, he also released a list of dozens of countries exempt from the controls, including many low-income nations. Unsurprisingly, the United Kingdom was not on it.
“The U.K. has legally-binding agreements with vaccine suppliers and it would not expect the EU, as a friend and ally, to do anything to disrupt the fulfillment of these contracts,” a 10 Downing Street spokesperson said.
The EU also said it would invoke a clause in the Brexit deal to impose controls on exports to Northern Ireland to ensure doses wouldn’t funnel through the region into the rest of the UK. It then backed down from the threat in the late hours of Friday night after UK and Irish leaders sought urgent clarification from Brussels over the highly controversial move.
EU leaders say AstraZeneca is prioritizing the U.K. in its deliveries. In response, it conducted a spot inspection of an AstraZeneca plant in Belgium on Thursday to ensure it was telling the truth about low supplies there. Some Brexit hardliners have lashed back at the moves, branding the EU as slow and incompetent.
Peter Bone, a Conservative British lawmaker, said EU leaders were “bullies” for inspecting the Belgian plant. In an interview with talkRADIO on Friday, he accused them of “trying to cover up for their own failures” and reversed the EU’s accusation, saying Brussels was trying to divert U.K.-made vaccines to its own people.
But the EU’s contract with AstraZeneca — which Brussels published on Friday — states that doses for the bloc could indeed come from a supply chain that includes UK-based plants. Equally, the U.K. is receiving doses from Europe as well — a person familiar with the matter said that the U.K. is still receiving small numbers of vaccines made in European plants, and that its initial doses had come from Europe too.
The U.K. government, which is miles ahead of the EU in vaccinating its population, has not released its contract with the company and has repeatedly declined to disclose to CNN how many doses it has in hand, citing “security reasons.”
The U.K.’s Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) told CNN that a “majority” of doses in the country came from within the UK, admitting some came from elsewhere.
Redactions of the published contract make it impossible to know just how badly the bloc has been hit, but AstraZeneca confirmed Friday it was aiming to ship at least 31 million doses to the EU by the end of March. Reuters had earlier reported the company had slashed the first quarter amount from 80 million doses to 31 million.
What the EU wants to know is why it isn’t receiving doses from the U.K.. BEIS did not answer CNN’s question on whether the U.K. had asked to be prioritized in its contract with AstraZeneca, saying only that it had ordered 100 million doses and had agreed timescales for delivery.
AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot, however, said openly that the company was supplying the U.K. first.
“The contract with the U.K. was signed first and the U.K., of course, said ‘you supply us first,’ and this is fair enough,” he told Italy’s la Republicca on Wednesday. The EU contract, on the other hand, did not legally bind the company to a particular schedule, he said.
EU Health Commissioner Stella Kyriakides denied that claim.
“We reject the logic of first come, first served,” she said at a press briefing on Wednesday. “That may work at the neighborhood butcher’s but not in contracts and not in our advanced purchase agreements.”
Much of the problem appears to come down the use of the term “Best Reasonable Efforts.” In its agreement with the EU, AstraZeneca agreed to making its best efforts in building capacity to produce the doses the EU had ordered. Any legal challenge would involve a decision on whether the company had indeed tried its reasonable best to produce and deliver.
At an AstraZeneca briefing on Friday, Soriot did not reveal any new details of its arrangement with the EU, saying only that the issue was “very unfortunate” and that the company was “working 24/7” to source new materials and improve supply.
“The manufacturing of vaccines is extremely complicated, it’s not like doing an orange juice, it’s extremely complicated and the teams that are manufacturing those products have to be trained and they have to master the process,” he said, adding that the U.K. had a head start in addressing inevitable teething issues.
It is understandable that the EU and U.K. would want to secure as many doses as possible in this early stage of their vaccination programs. The pandemic has hit both the U.K. and the bloc profoundly.
Of the world’s worst-affected countries, the U.K. now has one of the highest confirmed Covid deaths proportionate to its population. EU nations too have struggled with devastating waves that have ripped through its elderly and vulnerable citizens.
But as the U.K. continues to give hundreds of thousands of Covid-19 shots by the day, Spain had to partly suspend its vaccination program this week, so low are its vaccine supplies. Germany has delayed its program and France says its program too is under threat.
There is a lot riding politically on a successful vaccine program. U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government has been lambasted by much of the media and public for a shambolic Covid-19 response. But the country’s leadership in developing, approving and now distributing vaccines is being widely celebrated. It’s a political win Johnson sorely needs.
The European Union too is determined to appear strong and functional after the U.K. officially left the bloc on December 31. Brussels will not want to make its decision to centralize vaccine procurement and distribution, in the name of equality and fairness, appear like a failure.
What appears not to be happening is any kind of civilized discourse between the U.K. and EU over what to do about the vaccine shortfall. Contracts aside, the unprecedented challenge of scaling up vaccine doses in the tens of millions could be an opportunity to coordinate to ensure the most vulnerable are vaccinated first.
It was only in September at the UN General Assembly that Johnson said “it would be futile to treat the quest for a vaccine as a contest for narrow national advantage.”
“The health of every country depends on the whole world having access to a safe and effective vaccine, wherever a breakthrough might occur; and, the U.K., we will do everything in our power to bring this about.”
Terje Andreas Eikemo, director of the Centre for Global Health Inequalities Research at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, said that vaccines should be shared among the world’s most vulnerable people first, regardless of where they live.
“It’s natural for governments to want to put their own populations first, and this is something that happens when there is a good that is limited. When you have that in a society, it will very often result in what we’re seeing with the EU and U.K.,” he told CNN.
“Everyone’s trying to gain what’s best for their populations, but we need to stay inclusive. This is a global problem, this is not a national problem.”
There is a huge sense of nervousness in much of the developing world: people there are watching some of the richest nations scramble for doses after buying up huge numbers of vaccines in advanced purchase agreements before they were even proven effective.
Dr. Nashwa Ahmad from the South City Hospital in Karachi, Pakistan, told CNN that she and her colleagues have been waiting for weeks to hear of news of access to vaccines.
“That means our healthcare workers still have to continue to do their jobs for endless hours without the protection of the vaccines. It’s very difficult,” she said.
Meanwhile, rich nations are continuing to expand their already large advance purchase agreements. The U.K. has secured more than 360 million doses in advance and plans to buy more than 150 million between from Johnson & Johnson and Valneva. That would be enough to cover nearly four times its entire population.
The EU has secured almost 1.6 billion doses, enough to cover the population three times. Other countries are also overstocking. Canada, for example, has purchased enough to cover its population almost four times its size.
At the World Economic Forum hosted remotely from Davos, Switzerland last week, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa slammed rich nations for hoarding, and urged them to share them with the world’s most vulnerable.
“Some countries have even gone beyond and acquired up to four times what their population needs, and that was aimed at hoarding these vaccines. And now this is being done to the exclusion of other countries in the world that most need this,” he said.
In anticipation of this problem, the COVAX initiative was established in June last year with the aim of making 2 billion vaccine doses available to be distributed to parts of the world where there were gaps, largely in the global south. Even that will only cover around 20 pre cent of people in each eligible country. Indeed, the same rich nations accused of hoarding are donating to the scheme, with the U.K. being the largest single-country donor.
The tussles for supplies have renewed calls for all countries to work within a centralized system to avoid this uneven distribution of COVID-19 shots.
“While many have commendably contributed large sums of money to COVAX, they undermine its effectiveness, and the overall effort to end the pandemic as rapidly as possible for everyone, when they simultaneously engage in vaccine hoarding,” Obiora Okafor, the UN’s independent expert on human rights and international solidarity, said in a statement recently.
But there appears to be little hope of that actually happening. Even the WHO — whose chief in September said initial vaccines should reach “some people in all countries, rather than all people in some countries” — appears to have lost hope of a truly collaborative response.
When asked by CNN at a press briefing whether the U.K. should be allowed to oblige AstraZeneca to provide it with vaccine doses first, WHO Regional Director for Europe Hans Kluge said that “solidarity does not necessarily mean that each country in the world starts at exactly at the same moment.”
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A St. John’s woman says she won’t be paying many more visits to Tim Hortons, after an email from the coffee chain led her to believe that she’d won a new boat — when she hadn’t won anything at all.
“I go to Tim’s quite a lot, seven days a week. I’m afraid now that’s going to change to no days a week,” Carol Evans told CBC News on Thursday.
Evans said she received an email from Tim Hortons on Wednesday afternoon while on a break from her work as an licensed practical nurse.
The email recapped the prizes she’d won in the annual Roll Up the Rim to Win contest, but there was one extra prize included — a brand new boat and trailer, valued at about $55,000.
Unfortunately, the excitement was over by the time she got home from work.
“I was just so excited, really excited. I thought I really won a boat and a trailer, $55,000 worth, and to find out at five to six, I had an email from them come in telling me it was a technical error,” she said.
“I don’t get my boat and I don’t get my trailer.”
Carol Evans of St. John’s was elated when she got an email from Tim Hortons saying she won $55,000 worth of prizes. Another email from the coffee giant a few hours later, telling her it was an error, had her crushed — and fuming.
Evans said her win was the talk of her co-workers.
“I work with about a hundred people in the run of a day, and more than that outside the OR, and everybody was so happy for me. They couldn’t believe it, I finally won something in my life,” she said.
“But to find out a few hours later I didn’t, it was disappointing, very disappointing.… I cried, it was so sad.”
Although she may not have taken it out on the water, Evans said winning would have meant a lot to her, like helping fund her retirement after more than five decades in nursing.
“I could have sold the boat and trailer and had some money, paid off some bills, probably could have, who knows, retired after 55 years of work,” she said.
In an emailed statement to CBC News on Thursday, Tim Hortons said the message was meant to show what each customer won over the course of the contest — and the boat was included by mistake.
“We developed a Roll Up To Win recap email message with the best intentions of giving our guests a fun overview of their 2024 play history.
“Unfortunately there was a human error that resulted in some guests receiving some incorrect information in their recap message.”
The company didn’t disclose how many people across the country received the email, but CBC News spoke to another person in western Newfoundland who got it.
Others in Edmonton, Hamilton and Brampton, Ont., were also told they’d won the boat.
By Wednesday afternoon, a Facebook group had formed with more than 200 people expressing outrage about the mistake and threatening to file lawsuits.
Tim Hortons sent the affected customers a letter, telling them to disregard that winning email and that it was sent as a result of “technical errors.”
“Unfortunately, some prizes that you did not win may have been included in the recap email you received. If this was the case, today’s email does not mean that you won those prizes,” the letter read.
“We apologize for the frustration this has caused and for not living up to our high standards.”
It’s a familiar story for Tim’s, however, as last year, its app mistakenly informed users they’d won $10,000.
Evans said two years of big mistakes just isn’t fair. She’d like to see Tim Hortons move away from the Roll Up to Win smartphone app and back to paper cups.
“It’s not fair to the public who spend their hard-earned money to go into Tim’s and buy their coffee every day, buy their lunch, and then think they won a prize and all of a sudden you learn, three hours later, you didn’t win a prize, and it’s not fair.”
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The new regulations will take effect in Bowen Island, Tofino, Pemberton and 14 other communities on Nov. 1
Published Apr 18, 2024 • Last updated 2 hours ago • 5 minute read
With less than two weeks before B.C.’s short-term rental restrictions take effect, visitors staying at an Airbnb, Vrbo or other short-term rental homes are told to check with their hosts to make sure they are not staying in illegal accommodations.
Guests should ask hosts if they are compliant with the new rules, said B.C.’s housing minister, even as he reassured guests they won’t be on the hook.
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“The responsibility to comply with the rules fall with the hosts and the short-term rental platforms,” said Ravi Kahlon at a news conference with Premier David Eby in Langley on Thursday. “We encourage people to continue to explore beautiful British Columbia, and stay in legal short-term rental accommodations.”The new regulations set to take effect on May 1 would restrict short-term rentals to principal residences and either a secondary suite or a laneway home/garden suite on the property.
They apply to more than 60 B.C. communities with populations of more than 10,000 people, as well as 17 smaller communities, including Bowen Island, Tofino, Osoyoos, Pemberton, and Gabriola Island, which have decided to opt in. For these communities, the rules will take effect on Nov. 1.
The new legislation carries penalties of $500 to $5,000 a day per infraction for hosts and reach as high as $10,000 a day for platforms.
Eby said the province’s principal residence requirement is meant to crack down on speculators while allowing homeowners to rent out spaces in their principal residences if they choose to do so.
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He acknowledged the restrictions could put some property owners’ investment and retirement plans into disarray, but made no apologies, saying people with money to invest should put their money elsewhere.
“Do not compete with individuals and families who are looking for place to live with your investment dollars,” Eby said, adding the government will “tilt the deck every single time toward that family.”
The government has set up a provincial enforcement unit, currently staffed by four people, to conduct investigations into alleged non-compliant units.
The enforcement will be largely done digitally and includes the use of a short-term rental data portal that’ll help local governments monitor and enforce regulations.
Municipalities with their own short-term rental restrictions can upload non-compliant properties to the portal, said Kahlon. Platforms will have five days to verify whether the units are on their sites. Local governments without short-term rental licensing can report properties they believe are not compliant.
The platforms will be required to remove non-compliant listings at the request of local or the provincial governments and provide the province with a monthly update of short-term listings on their sites, said Kahlon.
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Companies such as Expedia and Booking.com are working to get ready for the new rules, and he’s hopeful other platforms will follow suit by May 1.
Airbnb said it has been in discussions with the provincial government for months and plans to comply with the new rules, but predicts they will harm the province’s tourism sector by taking extra income away from residents and limiting accommodation options for people, while doing little to improve the housing crunch for residents.
“They’re doing this because they say there’s going to be an impact on housing, that this will free up more housing for people,” said Nathan Rotman, Airbnb’s policy lead in Canada. “That is just not true.”
Despite several years of Airbnb restrictions in Vancouver, for example, rents have gone up while vacancies stayed low, he said.
Kahlon said the pending rules are already having a positive impact on housing availability with short-term rentals being converted to long-term use or being put up for sale.
In March, more than 19,000 entire homes in B.C. were listed as short-term rentals for most of the year, said the province. Even if half of those units are returned to the long-term market, that’ll make a “substantial difference” in communities, said Kahlon.
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Eby said there has been a “massive upswing” in hotel construction in key tourist areas as an unintended result of the new policies.
Bowen Island, a small community of 4,200 whose council voted in March to opt into the province’s short-term rental regulations, has seen increased pressure from tourists and housing demand in recent years.
The decision was council’s way “to balance what is appropriate use in residentially-zoned neighbourhoods while still allowing property owners to still do what they want with their properties,” said Mayor Andrew Leonard.
The principal residence requirement still allows for Airbnb and other short-term rentals on the island, he pointed out. “The vast majority of short-term rental operations are unaffected. This just keeps it in the homes of homeowners instead of speculators.”
Some communities, including Parksville’s Resort Drive area, were granted an exemption last month under the province’s exemption for strata hotel or motels. The area was purpose-built as tourism accommodation more than two decades ago.
The new legislation is being challenged in B.C. Supreme Court by Victoria-based groups and the Westcoast Association for Property Rights, who are calling for a review of the new rules and compensation for financial losses.
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According to Airbnb, Airbnb bookings and related spending generated around $2.5 billion in B.C. in 2023 and created 25,000 jobs.
The company says that for every $100 spent on an Airbnb booking, guests also spent about $229 on other travel spending.
More than three quarters of hosts polled by the company say they use their Airbnb earnings to cover rising costs of living, especially housing.
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Short-term rental platforms that violate B.C.’s pending regulations can face administrative penalties of up to $10,000 per day, officials announced Thursday.
Investigations into non-compliant companies and individual hosts will be conducted by a provincial enforcement unit, which will launch once the new rules take effect on May 1.
The Ministry of Housing said daily penalties will range from $500 to $5,000 for hosts, depending on the infraction, and reach as high as $10,000 for corporations.
Speaking at a news conference in Langley, Premier David Eby reiterated that the purpose of the province’s regulations is to open up thousands of potential long-term housing units that are currently being offered year-round on apps such as Airbnb and VRBO.
“The commitment that we have as government is to ensure that the housing stock that we have – the homes that are actually built – are available for people who are looking for a place to live,” Eby said.
The premier acknowledged his family, like many others in the province, has benefited from the availability of short-term rentals, and stressed that those types of accommodations will not be banned outright next month.
But the government previously calculated there were 19,000 whole homes being used exclusively as short-term rentals last year.
“I can tell you there are 19,000 families and individual that are looking for a place to live … right now that are in competition with people who are looking to operate homes like hotels,” Eby said.
Under the new rules, hosts can still rent out their primary residence, as well as one “additional unit, secondary suite or laneway home” on the same property, according to the ministry.
Those rules apply in every B.C. community with more than 10,000 residents, and to any others that opt in – as several already have, including Tofino, Pemberton, Osoyoos and Bowen Island. The rules will take effect in those smaller communities in November.
And once the regulations take effect, Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon stressed that guests themselves “will not face any fines.”
“We encourage people to continue to explore beautiful British Columbia, and stay in legal short-term rental accommodations,” Kahlon said.
Officials have recommended anyone planning to stay in a short-term rental on or after May 1 reach out to the host to confirm that the unit will be in compliance.
It’s unclear which violations will potentially cost platforms $10,000 per day. The government has said companies will be required to share user data to help municipalities and the province conduct their own enforcement, as the regulations also give local bylaw officers the ability to impose fines of up to $3,000 per day on hosts.
Platforms will be expected to remove listings from non-compliant users under some circumstances as well.
The announcement from officials came hours after Airbnb shared an “economic analysis” estimating that the platform generated more than $2.5 billion in economic benefits across the province last year.
According to the company, for every $100 a guest spent on an Airbnb rental, they spent about $229 on other local goods and services.
“B.C.’s new short-term rental law is going to significantly impact the province’s tourism sector, just as peak tourism season arrives – taking extra income away from residents, limiting accommodation options for guests, and potentially putting at risk billions in tourism spending and economic impact,” Nathan Rotman, Canadian policy lead at Airbnb, said in a statement.
But officials have claimed the pending rules are already having a positive effect on housing availability – addressing a major crisis in the province – as former hosts choose to either become landlords or put their properties up for sale.
Kahlon said some companies, such as Expedia and Booking.com, have been “actively working to get ready for the coming changes,” and that he’s hopeful other platforms will follow suit by May 1.
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