Two-Day Virtual Summit On Vaccines, Security Starts @ 1500CET

A two-day virtual summit of European Union member state heads of gov't gets underway in just over an hour at 1500CET (0900ET, 1400GMT).

• The main topics of discussion will be the ongoing rollout of COVID-19 vaccines in the EU, as well as security and defence matters with NATO Sec-General Jens Stoltenberg due to take part in the Council summit to discuss EU-NATO relations.
• There is likely to be some tension in the Council surrounding the vaccine rollout. The European Commission is widely viewed as having bungled the purchase and rollout of vaccines. This error has been compounded by some of the Council's most senior members such as French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who have both voiced doubts publicly about the effectiveness of the AstraZeneca/Oxford University vaccine on the over-65s. This has seen swathes of Europeans refusing that specific vaccine, setting back the effort to vaccinate the bloc's population.
• Security talks likely to focus on EU's 'strategic autonomy', a phrase used increasingly frequently by Macron to describe an EU that is not reliant on the Anglo-American defence umbrella that has historically been provided but has meant the EU has had to remain in near lock-step with Washington, D.C.'s foreign policy goals. However, given the vanishingly small expenditure on defence among many EU member states at present, this goal seems unachievable in the short-to-medium term.