Exclusive: a litany meant that when Italy was facing a disaster, its call for misery to the EU was in shocking silence
by Daniel Boffey Celine Schoen, Ben Stockton and Laura Margottini
It’s a moment of terrifying clarity. On 26 February, when the number of Italians inflamed with coronavirus tripled every 48 hours, the country’s prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, sought help from other EU member states.
Their hospitals were overcrowded. Italian doctors and nurses no longer had the masks, gloves and aprons they needed for themselves, and doctors were forced to play God with the lives of other seriously ill people due to the obvious lack of fanatics.
An urgent message sent from Rome to the European Commission headquarters in Berlaymont in Brussels. Italy’s wish specifications have been downloaded into the EU Common Emergency Information and Communication System (CECIS).
But what happened next came as a shock. The distress call was met with silence.
“No member state responded to Italy’s request and to the commission’s call for help,” said Janez Lenarčič, the European commissioner responsible for crisis management. “Which meant that not only is Italy is not prepared … Nobody is prepared … The lack of response to the Italian request was not so much a lack of solidarity. It was a lack of equipment.”
Some 180,000 European citizens, across the European economic area and the UK, have died from coronavirus and 1.6 million have been infected since the disease crept on to the continent in December last year courtesy of a mystery patient zero.
The true number of deaths is almost certainly higher than so far recorded. The recent rise in infections in Serbia and the Balkans are cause for great concern. The continent is now on an unalterable course to the worst economic recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s, largely as a result of the lockdowns required to shield its many under-funded healthcare systems.
Leaders were asked basic questions about the goal of the European allocation when states do not help others in the darkest moments. This weekend, the 27 EU heads of state and government will meet in Brussels for the first time in users in five months to go out and chart a course to follow.
Today, through internal archive research and interviews with dozens of EU officials and experts in Brussels and EU capitals, the Guardian and the Office of Investigative Journalism can tell the full story of how Europe has the epicentre designated by whoE. “From a global pandemic and what key classes can be learned.
It is a story of well-meaning officials in Brussels speaking in urgent tones of an impending disaster to empty press conference rooms. Of increasingly desperate health ministers unable to convince their heads of government and finance ministries of the scale of what was coming and the imperative to act. Of governments belatedly recognising the speed at which the virus was spreading, only to rush into uncoordinated acts of protectionism in moments of ill-concealed panic. And of EU institutions and agencies in which central figures either lacked the experience or powers to get capitals to act together in the face of a disease with respect for neither borders nor the glacial pace of Brussels’ bureaucracy. It is the story of an EU caught ill-equipped and institutionally incapable of mounting an adequate response to the crisis that so swiftly engulfed it.
It was as millions of Europeans prepared for their New Year’s Eve celebrations that officials in the Stockholm office of the EU public health agency, the European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (ECDC), first received notice of a cluster of pneumonia cases in China of unknown origin.
Created in 2005 in reaction to the Sars outbreak two years earlier, ECDC provides clinical advice. There’s something you can do. Responsibility for fitness lies entirely with national governments of the EU, the European Commission or its agencies. Despite its limitations, the ECDC’s task is to look at the full European horizon and sound the alarm, whether the capitals hear or not.
The company conducted its first risk assessment on January 9, said the company’s director, Dr. Andrea Ammon. “At the time, the concept [was] that the maximum case was similar to this live animal market [in the Chinese city of Wuhan],” he told the Guardian. “About two weeks later, it turned out that it’s the person-to-person transmission that, of course, adjusts what you want to do.”
The initial concern was how to keep the disease outside the EU’s borders. On 17 January a first coronavirus conference call was held by another EU body born out of previous health crises – but again lacking the powers retained by the national governments.
The European commission’s health security committee comprises health ministry representatives from each member state and has had responsibility for coordinating cross-border health threat responses in Europe since the H1N1 influenza outbreak of 2009.
But on 17 January, 12 of the 27 Member States called, plus the United Kingdom.
Wolfgang Philipp, head of a small team in the committee’s fitness branch in Luxembourg, chaired the meeting. He told those who provide that a few dozen people in Wuhan had been inflamed with a new strain of coronavirus.
With another 300,000 people expected to arrive in Europe from China that month, many of whom will celebrate Chinese New Year on January 25, the question was what to do with direct flights from Wuhan to London, Paris and Rome.
Screening all airport arrivals with symptom checkers and thermometers was believed to be largely ineffective in stopping the spread of the virus, an official from the ECDC told the committee. They instead recommended targeting passengers on the 12 weekly flights arriving in Europe from Wuhan.
The UK and France shared information about what they were doing at airports. But there was no update from the Italian government, one of the many absentees. The Italian representative hadn’t noticed the email inviting him to the meeting.
The committee had planned to issue recommendations on border measures. But those who were provided may simply disagree. This is a sign of concern about the difficulties the committee would face.
While governments must report to the Health Safety Committee before implementing action, unilateral action will be taken several times in the coming weeks. The format and short duration of the meetings, which usually provide only one hour with approximately one hundred other people, would also restrict communication and cooperation imaginable, resources said.
Participants would be frustrated that some countries did not give the committee “the weight it deserves.” His ability to coordinate well has been called into question. “There was no time to catch up for more than a week, ” said the source. “The occasions took position at a normal speed.”
And at the head of the commission, Ursula von der Leyen, just weeks after taking the job as chairman of the commission.
The pandemic is a crisis that may have been designed for Von der Leyen, a doctor before embarking on a political career that would take her to the German Ministry of Defence. He joined the EU’s executive branch in December.
Significant intelligence with steel, according to the resources that worked with it in the crisis, however, some of those within the formula will wonder if he could have done more in the first few weeks. Some said their first steps were temporary. She did not seem to be sure of the levers at her disposal.
“The commission took a hand earlier,” an EU official said. “Von der Leyen is intelligent. But it is new to Brussels and it is based on some other people in Berlin who also do not revel in the commission and what is possible. It is not asking Member States if they need coordination.” , you’re just coordinating. Health is a national jurisdiction, but you can do things.”
If this is the beginning of stuttering through a Brussels rookie, the seriousness of what is happening in China was at least understood very early in some parts of the committee.
“We convened the first assembly of the so-called Crisis Coordination Committee on January 28,” Lenar-i said. “The commission has taken this risk seriously. And we’ve replaced the course in our serious approach. Even when the voices multiplied there, “everything will die.” We even replaced direction when others played with the concepts of collective immunity.”
The committee took a quick resolution to ban its non-essential staff to China and a press convention was convened on January 29 to send a transparent message: prepare.
But if the alarm went off at the Berlaymont, the media had other interests. The UK is about to leave the EU after 47 years of membership.
“We went to the press convention and the press room was almost empty,” Lenar-i recalled. “We have called for preparation, so that all Member States take this seriously and prepare. There was a lot of echo because of the empty room. But we were hoping there would be an echo in the media the next day. We didn’t.” we traced a lot of this because all the media attention in Brussels was, at the time, true to the last consultation of the plenary session of the European Parliament in which the British members participated.”
“So, a lot of pictures of other people doing a song holding hands in the plenary,” Lenar-i said. “I perceive it as a historic moment, it’s an unhappy moment, it’s an emotional moment. But all this doesn’t replace the fact that we had something to say that same day. And we said that, and few people were interested.”
Only newspapers and broadcasters have heard the sirens of the executive branch and EU agencies.
In the same week, the ECDC begged governments for the capacity of their hospitals and, in particular, extensive care units.
The urgency of caution did not strike in the capitals. “I think it turned out to be that they underestimated, in my opinion, the speed at which this buildup occurred,” said Ammon, former head of the Department of Infectious Diseases Epidemiology at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin, who took over ECDC in 2017. “Because it’s another scenario if you have to look for an increase in bed capacity in two weeks or two days.”
Meanwhile, the virus continued to spread silently. On 30 January, two Chinese tourists in Rome tested positive for coronavirus. The Italian government promptly banned all flights to and from China and called on an assembly of EU fitness ministers to push for stricter access measures across Europe.
But it took the assembly three weeks to get organized. The Croatian government, guilty of calling him as the holder of the slippery presidency of the Council of the EU, was found to be embroiled in a monetary scandal in which Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic was forced to fire his Minister of Health, Milan. Kujund-i. By the time the fitness ministers still met on February 13, the portfolio of instances was growing.
The reaction to the risk of coronavirus had been “fast and effective,” Croatia’s new physique minister said, chairing the council meeting.
But an internal ECDC report dated the day after the assembly gave another account, directory, a litany of things still unknown about the virus and its dangers to Europe. “The provision in other Member States” was “uncertain,” he said.
The stark reality that in the months and years leading up to the arrival of coronavirus in Europe, stocks of non-public protective devices (PPEs) had declined. The emergency mask materials had expired, had been destroyed and never replaced. Pandemic preparedness plans were outdated.
“Several European countries had a strategic stock of masks that were outdated … Most of them were just destroyed,” said one scientific adviser.
France had 1.7 billion protective masks in 2011, but now has 117 million. Between January and March of this year, he incinerated 1.5 m. In 2017, Belgium ordered the destruction of the 38m mask and they were never replaced.
Apparently, no one had control over what was there. Until February 23, flights using PPE donations left Europe for China in the hope of containing the virus. But the unpleasant fact that Europe itself exposed.
“My colleague [Health Commissioner] Stella Kyriakides had been asking for knowledge from the beginning,” said Lenar-i, a former Slovenian ambassador to the EU. “Very soon and, according to my information, they never obtained the full knowledge that would allow the commission to have a transparent picture of the stocks of appliances and functions of the extensive care units. And in many cases, it turned out that the Member the states themselves did not have a transparent picture of their capacity of this kind.
By the weekend of 29 February and 1 March, more than 2,000 people were infected in Europe. In Italy, 35 people had died. Von der Leyen decided to put herself at the forefront of the crisis.
She informed Lenarčič that the scale of the crisis required a coronavirus crisis response team of commissioners covering everything from health to the economy and borders.
The new team introduced the public on Monday. When Von der Leyen walked to the lectern with the click of the camera shutter, he greeted the butlers. “Come on, come on, ” he heard.
However, within hours, The Europeans witnessed one of the biggest mistakes of the entire pandemic. Now, all in the midst of a crisis, European countries have acted to impose export restrictions on their neighbours.
On 3 March, French President Emmanuel Macron announced that he would requisition “all stocks and production of protective masks.” The next day, the German government banned the export of PPE.
A total of 15 Member States imposed restrictions on the movement of appliances or medicines within the EU during the epidemic. Mask trucks, gloves and protective robes were stopped on some borders. European leaders have accused each other of undermining European solidarity and the singles market.
PPE shipments destined for EU countries that arrived in ports in Germany and France were “very simply stolen”, said a source. The Belgian and Dutch governments meanwhile were buying up the ingredients to make key drugs and delivering them to hospitals to be produced on-site.
With a limited source of these ingredients in Europe, the resolution has cried out the pharmaceutical industry’s efforts to develop the manufacture of the medicines needed to treat the most severe coronavirus cases.
By the time European health ministers attended a second council meeting on 6 March, the health commissioner Stella Kyriakides, flanked by Lenarcic and Thierry Breton, commissioner for the internal market, felt the need to stress the importance of European unity. “I ask you all today to commit to us all working together, openly and transparently, in a spirit of solidarity to ensure a coherent political response,” Kyriakides said.
However, just a few days later, Germany unilaterally closed its borders, stopping the continent, with photographs of 50 km (31 miles) queues on the German-Polish border that dominate the news. The divisions of old Europe to return.
“It is not a problem to close the border but you have to talk to your neighbour on the other side of it and some didn’t,” said Lenarčič. “That was wrong and created a lot of problems. First it hampered the flow of goods which is dangerous not only for the functioning of the single market but also for the Covid response because some of those goods are essential like medical equipment, not to talk about food.”
There’s a burning anger at the headquarters of the commission. “The commission acted forcefully and without delay to convince all member states that have been involved in such self-centered measures,” Lenar-i said.
To placate those claiming that there were “people running around Europe with big bags of cash buying everything they could at any price”, the commission agreed to an export authorisation scheme to control what equipment left the bloc, Lenarčič said. But it had been a sobering moment for those with faith in the union. “Things were not done properly.”
It was a scenario surely unimaginable even just a few weeks earlier. From 9 March, starting with Italy, and ending on 23 March when Boris Johnson finally followed suit, Europe’s governments shut down their economies one-by-one. Only Sweden went its own way.
For some, it was all too late. “If Italy could have done it 10 or 14 days before it would have been better. The ministry of health wanted to do that but it took time to convince the government,” prof Walter Ricciardi, a senior adviser to the Italian health ministry said. “But they [the other member states] had the Italian experience and they didn’t follow it … It was very difficult for ministers of health to convince ministries of finance and prime ministers that this was a serious situation”
On 12 March, Von der Leyen’s experts told him that the epidemic in Europe could not be stopped. The next day, the head of the World Health Organization declared that Europe is now the “epicenter” of the global pandemic.
For the commission, the primary imperative was to unload equipment. Ricciardi, however, recalls his deep sadness at what happened next. “At the time, we desperately needed PPE and enthusiasts and it was almost to place them in the market,” Ricciardi recalls. “Our call was, therefore, the distribution of what was provided in Europe and the joint supply. But it took him two months to do it. Not because of the European Commission’s unwillingness, however, the procedure was very slow and bureaucratic. We only had enthusiasts when our sharp stage was over.
The commission had first raised the idea of joint procurement of PPE, of becoming “one big buyer”, in mid-January, but had been faced with a lack of interest from the member states. It was not until 5 February that it was decided to launch a formal assessment of what PPE member states might need.
It then took governments two weeks, and several deadlines, to pass on the information. At the time, global stocks had been seriously depleted and Member States, knowing their plight, were contacting Chinese brands individually, creating a higher festival on the market.
By Thursday 12 March, the scheme hadn’t secured a manufacturer. A notice was posted to the EU’s contract database of the failure. It would take two weeks to find one. The first delivery of masks under the scheme was on 8 June.
The Commission had to take the initiative because it became transparent that the non-unusual procurement formula is ineffective. The emergency law was rushed to allow the committee to build a central reserve through a program called RescEU.
While Member States would be to blame for the source of the supplies, the commission would administer their distribution and the maximum canopy of costs. Hundreds of thousands of masks have been distributed to pandemic hotspots to date. Looking ahead, Lenar-i believes this is the style to follow as leaders meet in Brussels on Friday to discuss their seven-year budget and single stimulus investment plans.
“In the Commission’s new budget proposal, investment in fitness is expanding from 400 million euros to nine billion euros,” he said. “The total logic is to give the committee the means to provide more assistance to Member States. Because when Italy asked for help, no one can just help you. We couldn’t help Italy either. The Commission needs to buy inventory equipment, rather than relying on the generosity of the Member States. It needs to make the type of apparatus bigger to cover the chemical, biological or nutransparent crises imaginable. “I see a very transparent lesson, ” said Lenar-i. “An overwhelming majority of the European public need to have more Europe in trouble like this.”
Ricciardi agrees. It also believes that the ECDC should be a decision-making framework and not just a crisis-time advisory framework, and that the commission has its head when coordination is vital. “Member States should be informed that we will have to prepare for this new general; this will be only the first in a series of events,” he said. “We will have it in the future. Behaviour, industry and tourism patterns are becoming around the world. And if we don’t realize that, we’ll be very disappointed.”