Ms Emily O'Reilly:

It is not something we have specifically looked into, although we may. I believe there will and must be investigations in many sectors in every member state. I am sure in Ireland this will also occur as to how things happened. At the moment, I do not believe it is an exaggeration to say things are happening at a frantic pace. I know it has been stated, reported and commented on that one of the reasons for the slowness in the vaccine roll-out in the EU was because of this haggling over pricing, for one thing, and that the EU and the Commission, perhaps, took a traditional conservative approach, which in times of crisis is probably a good thing. People will demand that they get good prices and so on.

The other approach was to just throw everything at it and say we are in an emergency with this crisis; this is a war. One might contrast the EU's response with those of the UK and US, which developed a warlike mentality.

This was evident even in the language that was used. Operation Warp Speed was former President Trump's description of throwing money at the vaccine development and roll out. We have seen what happened in the UK as well. One could also say that there was a huge political imperative for both of those countries to do it, given the huge and appalling number of deaths that had happened on those Governments' watch. Nonetheless, while I have not investigated this and do not have facts to hand that I can stand over, there does appear to have been a classically bureaucratic, conservative approach taken by the EU. That said, we must also remember that there are 27 member states involved. Austria, for example, now wants more of the available vaccines but the other member states have said that it did not do its homework at the beginning, did not order enough doses and was a little bit frugal. The EU also has to consider poorer countries and it has been to the fore, beyond anything that the UK or US has done, in giving vaccines to other countries. The figures in that regard are quite impressive.

When this calms down, we will be able to make definitive judgments about this but we must all recognise that this was an unprecedented situation. There was no play book for this. Obviously mistakes were made but good things have been done as well.