All the blaming of the UK seems to have been really blatant scapegoating that went unchallenged because it fit with what the media wanted people to believe, tho

All the blaming of the UK seems to have been really blatant scapegoating that went unchallenged because it fit with what the media wanted people to believe, though. The UK suffered the same shortfall in yield of the AstraZeneca vaccine as everywhere else, though to a slightly lesser extent early on as the production line here got funded earlier and the early teething troubles sorted out sooner. We were also far more reliant on the AZ vaccine than the EU, as they themselves liked to point out in order to argue they actually did a good job. This meant the yield and blood clot issues had a much bigger impact here. The UK government just did a far better job of limiting the impact of this by ordering more vaccines early on, basing their rollout on what AZ could actually deliver, and better public communications about the safety of the vaccine. There's no reason the EU couldn't have done the same other than their own decisions - AZ was quite keen to set up larger-scale manufacturing for the EU, and they could easily have negotiated a provision like the UK's requiring timely notice of how much vaccine would actually be delivered. They just didn't because they didn't seem to understand why this was necessary.