BRUSSELS: EU leaders grappled on Thursday with the threat of new coronavirus variants as wary countries push for a closure of Europe’s internal borders to stop the spread.
The chiefs held a summit — by videolink to protect themselves from infection — “to raise political awareness on the seriousness of the situation with the new variants,” an EU official said.
Virus mutations that emerged in Britain, South Africa and Brazil have alarmed EU authorities because of their increased infectivity, prompting bans or restrictions on travellers from those countries.
But calls are increasing to shut the intra-EU borders in a coordinated manner and not to repeat the experience in March when several member states panicked and closed off their national borders unilaterally, triggering travel chaos.
That decision came to be seen as disastrous, disrupting the already stumbling European economy, and the leaders will work hard to find ways to thwart the variants while keeping factories and businesses running at capacity.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel warned on Tuesday that while she hoped leaders would find alternative ways to stop the variants, she could not rule out border checks.
Belgium — wedged between Germany, France and the Netherlands — said it would plead for a “temporary” closure for the February holiday, when millions of Europeans usually head for the ski slopes.
“Non-essential travel that we can now do without, like tourism, clearly we can no longer take that risk,” Prime Minister Alexander De Croo told RTBF TV.
For now, the variants remain a tiny proportion of overall cases in the EU, and health officials are in a race to execute vaccination jabs before the mutants dominate.
While there was no indication as yet the new variants were more deadly, there were concerns they could infect more people and overload hospital intensive care capacity.
European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen said the bloc will soon expand vaccines beyond the BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna ones currently authorised to inoculate 70 per cent of adults in the EU before September.
“This is doable, it is ambitious, but we have to be ambitious — people are waiting for that,” she said on Wednesday.
The vaccination roll-out across the European Union has been disappointingly slow compared with the United States, Israel and other countries, a problem compounded by delivery shortfalls of the BioNTech/Pfizer doses. — AFP
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