EU officials attacked pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca on Wednesday, but failed to guarantee commitments to deal with a “huge” drop in coronavirus vaccine production, which will leave the block at least 75 million doses below expectations in the first three months of 2021.
“We regret the continuing lack of clarity in the delivery schedule and request a clear plan from AstraZeneca for the rapid delivery of the quantity of vaccines we have booked for the first quarter,” EU health commissioner Stella Kyriakides, tweeted after a meeting on Wednesday night that included an unexpected appearance by AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot.
Kyriakides insisted that the European Commission would work with the company “to find solutions and provide vaccines to EU citizens quickly”. But the guarantee seemed somewhat hollow after a day when the EU threatened legal action, brandished the prospect of vaccine export restrictions and criticized Soriot and his company for failing to fulfill their “contractual, social and moral obligations” – just to emerge from the meeting empty-handed.
Failure to get any concrete redress from the company would certainly increase political tensions in the 27 EU member countries, with the coronavirus pandemic still raging and political leaders under increasing pressure to explain why the EU lagged behind countries like Israel and the United States and especially the UK in delivering vaccines to citizens.
Tensions are particularly high with the situation in the UK, where AstraZeneca is headquartered and where the company is now making its vaccine in two factories that appear to be operating at full throttle. The UK is currently receiving all deliveries expected from these factories after initial hiccups that last month prompted the company to send vaccines to Britain that were manufactured in factories in the Netherlands and Germany.
In an impressive interview at La Repubblica on Tuesday, Soriot blamed the EU for being three months slower than the UK in finalizing its purchase agreements for the vaccine, which AstraZeneca developed in conjunction with the University of Oxford, and said that the UK government was rightly hoping that all doses of the vaccine would produce within its borders would remain there for the foreseeable future.
At a news conference on Wednesday, Kyriakides categorically accused AstraZeneca of violating its contractual obligations and demanded that the company do what was necessary, including redirecting supplies from UK factories to make up for the deficit on the continent. She also insisted that Britain had no priority over vaccines manufactured in its territory.
“Not being able to guarantee the production capacity is against the letter and spirit of our agreement,” said Kyriakides, adding: “We regret the logic of first come, first served. This may work for neighborhood butchers, but not in contracts and not in our advance purchase agreements. ”
In London, Prime Minister Boris Johnson made it clear that he did not want to participate in the EU dispute and gave no indication that he would be willing to help Brussels. “We are very confident in our supplies,” Johnson said on Wednesday when asked about the EU’s claim on doses in the UK. “We are very confident in our contracts and we are moving forward based on that.”
Asked about the EU pressure on AstraZeneca, Johnson said: “The Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccine is obviously very important for our country and the world. The issue at hand is for our friends from the EU and AstraZeneca. “
Money matters
Despite Soriot’s criticism that the EU took too long to commit to buying his company’s vaccine, in fact, four EU countries reached an agreement with AstraZeneca last June, shortly after the UK signed its initial contract in May.
But the details mattered little because it was clear that the EU had little influence on the company, despite having allocated € 336 million to help it develop the vaccine and prepare to produce it in large quantities, even before receiving the vaccine. formal approval by the European Medicines Agency, which is expected on Friday.
The Commission has not yet disbursed all € 336 million – there remains a “good part” of that, said an EU official, “not just a few cents”. Another Commission official said the Commission would “chase” the company for a refund.
But withholding or receiving money back will be no consolation, since what the EU’s heads of state and government need – and what their citizens are demanding – of vaccine.
And on that front, there seemed to be little that Brussels could do to guarantee more doses immediately.
Commission officials acknowledged that the litigation would take years. “This is not really the focus of our attention,” said another EU official. “The focus of our attention is on executing the contract now because vaccines are needed now, not two years from now.”
Meanwhile, in the European Parliament, chairman of the health committee Pascal Canfin plans to drag AstraZeneca, Pfizer and Moderna CEOs in audience.
Accumulation problems
While the EU is planning to impose new export controls – initially with the aim of determining exactly how much vaccine is being produced and where manufacturers plan to send it – taking a very hard line on that front could backfire.
Leaders from other parts of the world, like South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, already accuse the EU and the richest countries of accumulating vaccines and denying access to developing nations. And there are other EU partners and allies, including Canada, also a member of the G7, that depend, at least in part, on the production of EU vaccines for their supplies.
Far from having strong weapons, AstraZeneca just reiterated its plan to deliver the vaccine as soon as possible. The company, which has production facilities worldwide, also expressed no concerns about potential export restrictions.
“Our CEO Pascal Soriot was pleased to attend a meeting with the EU’s Vaccine Management Board tonight,” a company spokesman said in a statement late on Wednesday. “We had a constructive and open conversation about the complexities of increasing the production of our vaccine and the challenges we face. We commit to an even closer coordination to jointly chart a path for the delivery of our vaccine in the coming months, as we continue our efforts to bring this vaccine to millions of Europeans without profit during the pandemic. ”
Soriot’s participation in the meeting also indicated the company’s relative confidence, despite the flood of criticism from Brussels about Soriot’s comments in his interview with the newspaper.
AstraZeneca told the Commission on Tuesday by e-mail that it would not attend the meeting of the Board of Directors, as it had no new information to share. Later, the company changed course and said that its executive vice president responsible for Europe and Canada would attend.
War of words by contract
AstraZeneca’s balanced statement was a stark contrast to the heated rhetoric coming from the Commission’s press room on Wednesday, where hundreds of journalists tuned in to a series of press conferences and technical briefings with an overwhelming focus on the vaccine dispute.
At his press conference, Kyriakides tried to take a hard line. “Let me be very clear,” she said, “the 27 member states of the European Union are united that AstraZeneca needs to fulfill its commitments in our agreements. We are in a pandemic. We lose people every day. These are not numbers and are not statistics. They are people with families, friends and colleagues, all affected too. Pharmaceutical companies, vaccine developers, have moral, social and contractual responsibilities that they need to respect. ”
And she especially questioned Soriot’s claim that AstraZeneca was under no obligation to supply a specific number of doses, but only to make the “best effort”.
“The view that the company is not obliged to comply because we signed a ‘best effort’ agreement is neither correct nor acceptable,” said Kyriakides.
She and other Commission officials insisted that the EU’s purchase agreements did not differentiate AstraZeneca’s factories in the UK from those of EU countries, and said the Commission would never have agreed to an agreement that depended on just one factory.
They insisted that AstraZeneca made clear commitments to Brussels, while being aware of its obligations to the UK and dismissed vague claims of production problems at a factory in Belgium as an insufficient excuse for a deficit they said it would leave the EU with only 25 percent of its expected vaccine deliveries in the first quarter.
An official suggested that AstraZeneca had misled the EU about its capabilities. “It was only last Friday that we discovered that, you know, there was a very large deficit and that is really something that is not acceptable,” said the official.
As the Commission struggled to manage the situation, it suddenly found itself changing some long standing positions. After months of insisting that confidentiality was absolutely essential to the success of vaccine purchase contracts, the Commission said it was demanding that AstraZeneca make its contract with the EU public, saying that it would contradict Soriot’s claims.
Last week, some EU heads of state and government expressed great anger at Pfizer, another vaccine maker, over a temporary slowdown in production at its factory in Belgium. But on Tuesday, the Commission praised Pfizer for handling its problems better than AstraZeneca.
Commission officials also acknowledged that they developed their contract with AstraZeneca for vaccine production in Europe, specifically to avoid the risk of export restrictions imposed by former U.S. President Donald Trump. Only now is the Commission moving ahead with its own export restrictions.
But a senior EU official said the bloc’s main objective was not to focus on any of these complexities. “What we are really, really interested in – this you need to understand – is not the dispute over this or that aspect,” said the senior official. “We want to have the vaccines. We want to find the solution with the company ”.
Charlie Cooper and Florian Eder contributed to the report.
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