// Why didn't [Gromit] use deaths per million?
That's right, it didn't suit [his] narrative. //
Just for the record, the UK's official* total deaths/million for Covid stands at around 3,350. By comparison, Germany and France stand at 2,100 and 2,550 on the same measure respectively. The EU as a whole stands at about 2,750. This hides significant variation among EU members, though, with many Eastern European countries clocking in higher rates, such as Hungary (4,900) and Croatia (4,550).
But even with that figure, I'm not sure of the narrative Gromit's pushing. There is, for example, no accounting in the above numbers** for eg population densities and other demographic factors (% of population over 60, for example, where health outcomes tended to get significantly worse); or for vaccine uptake, which was particularly poor in Croatia as an example.
But mostly, it's bizarre to me to juxtapose any of these figures (total deaths or total death rate if you like) with the date of vaccine approval. One might be forgiven for thinking that the UK "messed up" by introducing the vaccine earlier, and that this "premature decision" ended up worsening outcomes here. Also, in the particular question of whether the vaccine(s) saved lives or not by being introduced earlier, one should properly compare the death rates before and after its introduction, and the extent to which a three-week delay might have impacted them, which is a largely separate question from the total death (rate). Would the UK's death toll have been higher still had the vaccine been introduced three weeks later? Most probably. How much higher? Hard to say.
Disentangling these things is hard, and people already got bored of this comment three paragraphs ago, so I won't go any further here. None of this, however, changes the legal point that Brexit had no effect on the UK's ability to introduce and approve a vaccine as fast as it did.
*Two sources I'm looking at,
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ and
https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus , differ slightly, but they are broadly in agreement, so I will round the worldindata values to the nearest 50 deaths/million.
** Plenty more data is provided at ourworldindata.org, so it's possible in principle to get some way towards addressing this by using their resources, but would take far more time and energy than I have right now.