• by Ray Schultz , March 31, 2020

It is hard to find humor in a global health crisis. But one piece of news may provoke snickers in some circles: An EU email on buying ventilators landed in Boris Johnson’s spam folder. Or so the Johnson government claims, according to the Independent.  

Here’s the backstory: The EU has devised a scheme to procure desperately needed ventilators in a bloc. But the UK is not participating. 

Is it because of Brexit? No. Rather, the government claims it didn’t get the emails: They “ended up in Boris Johnson’s spam folder, or something like that,” The Independent writes.

The report does not sound sympathetic. 

“It would be churlish to point out that, well, the 27 countries that are still in the EU all got the email, didn’t they?” the Independent writes.

There’s two solutions. One is that Johnson, however much he hates the idea, has to flag EU as a trusted email sender. The other is that EU should work on email deliverability.