A timeline of the EU's pandemic, from the first case detected on January 24 2020 to renewed border closures due to concern about new variants. Graphic @Paul5cott

Looking back over the year, these are the highlights and lowlights of the EU response to the pandemic, in my observation.
Lowlights first:

- Initial slowness to react to what was happening. Galling example: on the same day an Italian doctors' body was advising how to choose between patients when there's a lack of staff or equipment, the Commission was putting out a press release on von der Leyen's 'first 100 days'

Health and borders are purely national powers, so the role of the Commission / scope for cooperation was initially unclear. It gained its purpose in response to border closures, to keep supply chains running and get EU citizens to their home countries.

Next lowlight: wading in on Covid-19 policy to emphasise economic concerns. The Commission started talking about opening up for economic reasons in April 2020 and in May wanted to 'reboot tourism' and 'allow people to take holidays'.
It was in response to lobbying ...

Pushed heavily by tourism-dependent member states, the travel industry, governments concerned about airlines etc. The short-sightedness is now gruesomely apparent...

A variant that emerged among Spanish farm workers in June, by October accounted for 60% of cases in Ireland and 80% in the UK, indicating the drive to reopen economies and facilitate travel and tourism drove the autumn's crushing new wave of infections. A totally false economy.

Next lowlight: while the Astrazeneca contract was signed in August, it took until November to sign with BioNTech-Pfizer, even though it was apparent it had overtaken AZ in the vaccine race. Member states were intimately involved in these negotiations: that's a joint EU failure.

Next lowlight: failure to cop on to, communicate and adjust to problems with Astrazeneca deliveries when they first became apparent in December. The cut from up to 120 mln doses to 80 mln then was apparently 'not alarming', but was a missed warning sign, as was messy trial data.

Next lowlight: belated overreaction to the Astrazeneca issue with crude power play over ALL pharma companies with vaccine export controls-- against the EU's own general policies on keeping the free flow medical supplies during the pandemic.

Final lowlight: catastrophic use of Article 16 to close a theoretical loophole in a policy that was bad to begin with. One call to the Irish perm rep could have avoided it. We don't have full accountability yet. Von der Leyen needs to woman up and take questions from the press.

Ok so here are the highlights:
First one was adjusting procedures to allow for cooperation over video conference and press conferences over video. It's pretty tricky with so many languages, interpretion requirements, etc and they did it quickly. First Council VC was March 10.

Next highlight: All the economic measures. European Central Bank pulls out the stops; Commission suspends borrowing rules, pushes all money easily on hand towards research, cheap loans, emergency response etc. Gives member states billions in cheap loans for unemployment support.

The crowning highlight is really the July achievement of €750 billion in pandemic emergency response in a mix of grants and loans for member states. Required the likes of Germany and the Netherlands to cross the rubicon of joint borrowing.

We can judge the soundness of that package of economic responses by the fact that Italy's borrowing costs have been steady and we haven't been tipped into a repeat of the eurozone debt crisis.

Next highlight: throwing money at vaccine research. The June pledging drive raised €15.9 billion for treatments, tests and vaccines. All of the pharmaceutical companies the EU did deals with got hundreds of millions of euros to speed up development of their vaccines.

In general I don't think the whole vaccine story is a highlight or a lowlight, it's complex and there are many factors. I think joint EU procurement was a no-brainer. I don't think there was a realistic or particularly desirable alternative to that or EMA approval.

There have been political mistakes. If there was any way to further speed up EMA approval even more than it was, it should have been done. It was a foreseeable and dumb political error not to send even token early vaccines to key peripheral states, such as in the Balkans.

More broadly, clearly the rich countries should not be hoarding so many vaccines. But that's on us really, the public. It's hard to see what political space leaders have to be sending doses overseas.

Anyway, myself and @PatLeahyIT do our best to sum up how the EU has fared in its pandemic year in this piece, available online or in your Irish Times weekend edition. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/eu-handling-of-covid-has-had-lots-of-lows-but-critics-ignore-things-it-got-right-1.4477315