BERLIN (AP) – Pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca has agreed to supply the European Union with 9 million additional doses of its coronavirus vaccine during the first quarter, the bloc’s executive arm said Sunday.
The new target of 40 million doses by the end of March is still only half of what the Swedish-British company originally targeted before announcing a deficit due to production problems, sparking a dispute between AstraZeneca and the EU last week .
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said after calling with seven vaccine manufacturers on Sunday that AstraZeneca will also start deliveries a week ahead of schedule and expand its manufacturing capacity in Europe.
“Take a step forward in vaccines,” tweeted Von der Leyen, who has been under intense pressure on the European Commission’s treatment of vaccine orders in recent days.
The EU is far behind Britain and the United States in vaccinating its 450 million population against the virus. The slow implementation was attributed to a series of national problems, as well as to a slower authorization of vaccines and an initial shortage of supply.
AstraZeneca’s announcement last week that it would initially supply only 31 million doses to the 27 EU member countries due to production problems sparked a heated dispute between the two sides, with officials in Brussels saying they feared the company was treating the block. unfairly compared to other customers like the UK.
On Friday, hours after regulators authorized the vaccine for use across the EU, the commission said it was tightening export rules. coronavirus vaccines, prompting an angry response from Britain. Since then, the commission has made it clear that the new measure will not limit shipments of vaccines produced in the 27-nation bloc to Northern Ireland, a territory of the United Kingdom that has been granted unrestricted cross-border access to the Republic of Ireland under the post- Brexit between Britain and the EU.
EU member states praised the bloc’s executive arm last year for signing several agreements with vaccine manufacturers, saying that joint purchasing using the combined market weight of the entire bloc ensured fair distribution to all 27 countries at good prices .
Since then, the mood of many EU citizens towards Brussels has soured, while countries outside the bloc accelerate in the race to vaccinate their populations.
The British government did not hesitate to promote the relative success of the vaccine, which helped to divert attention from the fact that the country remains at the top of the death table in Europe.
Official figures show that 598,389 shots were administered across the UK on Saturday, more than six times the number that Germany achieved on Friday, the last day for which data were available.
Germany has so far administered at least one dose to 2.2% of its population. Britain did the same with 13.2% of its citizens.
In response, Chancellor Angela Merkel called on state governors on Monday to discuss what the German media is describing as a “vaccination disaster. “
Von der Leyen, who was Germany’s defense minister before taking office in Brussels, insisted that the EU “made good progress”.
“Of course, we are currently in a difficult phase,” she told German public broadcaster ZDF, but added that in the second quarter more vaccine would become available as regulators approved additional formulas and increased production capacity was brought online.
Pfizer, which developed the first widely tested and approved coronavirus vaccine together with German company BioNTech, said it expects to increase global production this year from 1.3 million doses to 2 billion doses. Probably tens of millions of them will 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, together with the industry, the EU said it will “finance the design and development of vaccines and increase production in the short and medium term, and also target the variants of COVID-19”.
“The pandemic highlighted that manufacturing capabilities are a limiting factor,” said the document. “It is essential to face these challenges.”
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