BRUSSELS (AP) – Amid signs that more contagious coronavirus variants are spreading uncontrollably across Europe, governments and EU leaders on Wednesday tried to speed up vaccination efforts hampered by limited supplies and to fund ways to detect variants and put them to counteract.
The European Union announced on Wednesday that it has agreed to purchase an additional 300 million doses of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine and injected nearly a quarter of a billion euros (nearly $ 300 million) into the fight against virus variants.
The news came just hours after Pfizer and BioNTech said they signed a deal to deliver an additional 200 million doses of vaccine to the block.
The European Commission said its second contract with Moderna provides for an additional purchase of 150 million doses in 2021 and an option to purchase 150 million additional doses by 2022.
“With a portfolio of up to 2.6 billion doses, we will be able to provide vaccines not only to our citizens, but also to our neighbors and partners,” said Ursula von der Leyen, head of the European Commission.
Von der Leyen and her team have been heavily criticized for their approach to the EU vaccine purchasing process. While the 27-nation bloc began vaccinating its 450 million citizens nearly two months ago, it still lags far behind Britain, the United States and others in the share of the population reached.
Von der Leyen also revealed EU plans to better detect virus variants and accelerate the approval of modified vaccines that can control them.
As the UK virus variant appears to be becoming dominant in the EU, the executive arm said it will spend at least € 75 million to support genomic sequencing and develop specialized tests for new variants. A further EUR 150 million is spent on research and data exchange.
“Our priority is to ensure that all Europeans have access to safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines as soon as possible,” said von der Leyen. “At the same time, new variants of the virus are emerging quickly and we need to adjust our response even faster.”
Germany’s Health Minister said the virus variant first discovered in Britain last year now accounts for more than a fifth of all positive tests in his country, from 6% to over 22% in just two weeks time.
In Slovakia, which now has the highest number of virus deaths per population in the world, authorities found the British variant in 74% of the positive samples.
Danish Health Minister Magnus Heunicke said the UK variant represented 45% of the cases analyzed in the second week of February and predicted that it will represent 80% of Danish infections in early March.
Scientists say the British variety spreads more easily and is likely to be more deadly, but existing vaccines so far appear to be effective against it. However, another variant first discovered in South Africa has shown signs of bypassing the immune response elicited by the AstraZeneca vaccine.
Authorities in Germany’s most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia, expressed concern that some people seemed less willing to take the AstraZeneca vaccine than those from Moderna or Pfizer.
“The authorized AstraZeneca vaccine is not a second-rate vaccine,” said the Ministry of Health. “The vaccine shows good effectiveness and is well tolerated.”
The reluctance to use the AstraZeneca vaccine, which is only given to people under 65 in Germany, has been reinforced by reports that some people had a fever and headache after receiving the injection. Officials say such reactions are normal after vaccinations, show that the body’s immune system is responding and should go away after a day or two.
Health Minister Jens Spahn said if people didn’t want an AstraZeneca injection, he and others would be happy to take it.
“If people who are being offered it don’t accept it, we will offer it to the next person,” he said, noting that Germany and the EU are still struggling with vaccine shortages.
Pfizer and German partner BioNTech have confirmed that they too have an agreement to supply the EU with an additional 200 million doses of vaccine.
The two companies said those doses – expected to be delivered this year, an estimated 75 million of them in the second quarter – are on top of the 300 million vaccine doses the block initially ordered. The EU has an option to request an additional 100 million doses.
Vaccine shortages are a charged problem in Europe.
Last month, Pfizer said it temporarily reduced deliveries to Europe and Canada while improving production capacity at its factory in Belgium. The EU also had a public argument with AstraZeneca about receiving fewer vaccinations than expected. The AstraZeneca chief blamed the backlog of new factories to solve vaccine production problems.
Spain’s foremost coronavirus expert says that given the current level of vaccine supply, it makes no sense to set up massive facilities to carry out the injections, echoing comments from US governors who are also dealing with vaccine shortages in their states.
The European Medicines Agency, meanwhile, said it could issue an opinion in mid-March on a fourth vaccine, a one-time version of Johnson & Johnson. The three other vaccines approved by the EU require two injections weeks apart.
Von der Leyen said the EU bought more doses than it needed to because it wanted to provide its neighbors with ‘from the Eastern Partnership to the Western Balkans to Africa’ – although some of those countries have already opted for vaccines from Russia and China after receiving countries in the early bids for vaccines.
The authorities in Berlin on Wednesday opened the fifth coronavirus vaccination center in the capital, located in an indoor cycling arena. The sprawling Velodrom started with just 120 vaccinations, but officials hope to increase that to 2,200 a day.
“We can’t complain,” said Dieter Krueger, who was waiting in the recovery room with Ilse, his 60-year-old wife, after an injection of Moderna vaccine. “It will be better.”
Jordans contributed from Berlin. Geir Moulson in Berlin, Jan M. Olsen on Copenhagen and Aritz Parra in Madrid contributed to this report.
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