Raab summons EU official as anger grows over UK vaccine export claims | Society

Dominic Raab has summoned the EU’s UK representative amid government fury over claims by the president of the European council that the UK has banned exports of vaccines, which the government says are entirely false.

In a row that threatened to reopen the rift between the UK and EU over vaccine policy, the foreign secretary wrote to Charles Michel expressing considerable concern at the statement he released on Tuesday and accused him of publishing false information.

Anger in Whitehall has been building for a number of days about the portrayal of the UK’s export policy in Brussels by senior EU politicians, not just Michel, as well as worry that the claim is widely circulating in European media.

A government source said the claim had been repeated at various levels within the EU and the commission and the UK had repeatedly privately corrected the record on every occasion – but intimated that Raab now needed to “draw a line in the sand”.

A representative of the EU’s delegation to the UK has since been summoned to a meeting at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.

Michel made the claim in a fierce defence of the EU’s vaccine policy published on Tuesday in his newsletter. He said the EU should not have been accused of hoarding vaccines via its export controls and said the UK had stronger prohibitions on exports.

“I am also shocked when I hear the accusations of ‘vaccine nationalism’ against the EU. Here again, the facts do not lie,” he wrote.