Ángel Collado
After the fiasco of his trip to the United States, without an interview with Biden or investment agreements, Pedro Sánchez faces the end of the political year determined to cling to the only positive data on the national scene: progress in vaccination against Covid.
The prime minister boasts that 54 per cent of the population has already received two doses and ignores the fact that Spain leads Europe in the spread of infections and that regulatory chaos once again reigns in the response to the fifth wave in the face of his decision to avoid managing the health crisis.
The tourism sector, the leading sector of the Spanish economy, considers half of the season lost and the health services recognise that the longed-for “herd immunity” that should prevent the spread of the virus will not be achieved this summer.
The head of the Executive has spent the last week attacking the opposition, even from his trip to the United States, and another front of conflict has opened up with the regional governments over the distribution of vaccines. This is the only facet of the pandemic that he wants to talk about, as if it were a good thing, although the government has no more responsibility for it than distributing the doses decided by Brussels. The regional health systems, which are responsible for administering them, complain that fewer and fewer are arriving, while Sánchez points to the success of the full vaccination schedule, which has already reached 26 million Spaniards.
The problem is that the rate of vaccination is slowing down in July, when it reached 700,000 vaccines a day at the end of June. On Mondays, neither the quantities announced nor the proportion of the different brands planned for each week arrive at the warehouses of the autonomous regions.
The autonomous governments of Catalonia, Madrid, Andalusia, Castile and Leon and Galicia (regions that account for more than half of the Spanish population) agree on the same complaint and give convincing figures for the reduction in supplies, between half and a third of what was promised.
The government limits itself to denying the data from the five autonomous regions and says that they have “sufficient” doses, although the official figures themselves show the slowdown. The reality is even further away from the forecasts made by Sánchez himself. First he spoke of reaching 70 percent of the vaccinated population before the summer, then he settled for doing so “in the summer” before specifying that it would be “in August”. Since the United States had already referred to “the end of the year”, the Moncloa media had to point out afterwards that it had been a slip of the tongue and that he had meant to say in September.
All the deadlines for achieving group immunity have been exceeded. Between the delay accumulated this month and the fact that after the second dose most vaccines require two or three weeks to reach the maximum level of protection, the goal of 70 percent of the population immunised in August looks very complicated. Adding to the difficulty is the experts’ warning about the delta variant that leads them to raise herd immunity to 85 percent.
The first economic consequence of Spain once again having the worst pandemic data in the EU this summer is another disastrous tourist season due to the drastic reduction in visits from other European citizens. The regulatory chaos, each in their own way, which has been caused by the autonomous governments in the face of Sánchez’s inaction, does not contribute to the reactivation of the sector either.
The President of the Government, who defined himself in the United States as “a politician who delivers”, has taken to the end his warning that he was not going to intervene in the management of the pandemic, neither with states of alarm nor with any legislative initiative on the matter.
