[luckylion]

> The view you've expressed above seems to be the only one I read among the British press/commentariat.

I'm from Germany, and that has been pretty much my impression as well. Merkel gave vaccine orders as a PR gift to von der Leyen/EU, they messed up badly. While that came out piece by piece, surprise surprise, in came the "mistakes".

I'm sure it's not a large conspiracy, at some point there's enough FUD spread everywhere that everyone's threshold for "pause the campaign" is low enough, "just to be safe", but some parts of it very much did look like revenge.