BERLIN (AP) – Pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca has agreed to deliver 9 million additional doses of its coronavirus vaccine to the European Union in the first quarter, the executive arm of the block said Sunday.
The new target of 40 million doses by the end of March is only half of what the British-Swedish company originally aimed for before announcing a shortage due to production problems, which sparked a row between AstraZeneca and the EU last week.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said on Sunday after a phone call with seven vaccine manufacturers that AstraZeneca will also start deliveries a week ahead of schedule and expand its manufacturing capacity in Europe.
“Step forward with vaccines,” tweeted von der Leyen, who has come under great pressure in recent days about the handling of vaccine orders by the European Commission.
The EU is far behind Britain and the United States in terms of vaccinating its 450 million inhabitants against the virus. The slow roll-out is due to a series of national issues, as well as slower vaccine authorization and an initial shortage of supply.
AstraZeneca’s announcement last week that it would initially deliver only 31 million doses to the 27 member states of the EU due to manufacturing issues sparked a fierce dispute between the two parties, with officials in Brussels saying they feared the company would be blocking the bloc. treated unfairly compared to other customers such as the UK.
On Friday, hours after regulators approved the vaccine for use across the EU, the committee said it is tightening rules for exports of vaccines against the coronavirus, which sparked an angry reaction from Britain. The commission has since made it clear that the new measure will not limit the shipment of vaccines produced in the 27-country bloc to Northern Ireland, a British territory that had guaranteed unimpeded cross-border access to the Republic of Ireland under the post-Brexit deal between Great Britain and the European Union.
EU member states last year praised the bloc’s executive for signing numerous deals with vaccine makers, saying the joint purchase with the bloc’s combined market weight had ensured a fair distribution for all 27 countries at good prices. .
Since then, the mood among many EU citizens towards Brussels has soured, while countries outside the bloc are ahead in the race to vaccinate their populations.
The UK government has not been shy about promoting its relative vaccine success, which has helped infer from the fact that the country is still at the top of the list in terms of deaths in Europe.
Official figures show that 598,389 shots were taken in the UK on Saturday, more than six times the number Germany managed Friday, the last day for which figures were available.
Germany has so far given at least one dose to 2.2% of the population. Britain has done the same for 13.2% of its citizens.
In response, Chancellor Angela Merkel called on state governors on Monday to discuss what the German media describes as a ‘vaccination debacle’. “
Von der Leyen, who was Germany’s Defense Minister before taking up the post in Brussels, insisted that the EU had “made good progress”.
“Of course, we are in a difficult phase right now,” she told German public broadcaster ZDF, but added that more vaccine would become available in the second quarter as regulators approve additional formulas and more production capacity goes online.
Pfizer, which has partnered with German company BioNTech to develop the first widely tested and approved coronavirus vaccine, has said it expects to increase global production from 1.3 million doses to 2 billion doses this year. Tens of millions of them are likely to go to the EU.
In a statement, the European Commission said it plans to create a specialized body to improve the bloc’s response to health emergencies and provide “a more structured approach to pandemic preparedness.”
As part of the effort, along with the industry, the EU said it will “fund vaccine design and development and scale up production in the short and medium term, as well as to address the variants of COVID-19.”
“The pandemic made it clear that production capacity is a limiting factor,” he said. “It is essential to address these challenges.”
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