A dispute between the European Union and the Swedish-British pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca threatens to hamper global vaccination efforts and increase tensions on the continent, as European countries struggle to vaccinate their populations amid the threat of more virulent strains of the coronavirus.
The EU purchased 400 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, which the company made in partnership with the University of Oxford, before being approved by EU regulators. But last week, AstraZeneca abruptly announced that, due to production problems, it would only be able to deliver about 40 percent of the total promised in the first quarter, or about 31 million doses, to the EU.
This, of course, angered EU leaders, who are desperately trying to inoculate their populations.
Reuters reported on Friday that the company has agreed to launch an additional 8 million doses – but the EU says this is not good enough and is requiring AstraZeneca to do more, including using its factories in the UK to compensate. the deficit.
AstraZeneca says it cannot do this, and that its contract with the EU (a heavily edited version of which was published Friday) requires only that it make the “best effort” to deliver vaccines to Europe. The problem is that the EU and AstraZeneca disagree on what “best effort” really means.
And now the struggle is threatening to spill over, with alarming implications for the global vaccination effort.
On Friday, the European Union approved the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine. But it also took the dramatic step of putting export controls on all vaccines against coronavirus.
The final regulation is due to be published on Saturday, but will require vaccine manufacturers to notify the EU when exporting coronavirus vaccines to most countries outside the European Union; more than 90 countries are exempt, but not the United States or the United Kingdom. Individual EU member states will then have to authorize these exports and can block them if they believe that companies that export vaccines are not complying with their own delivery agreements with the EU.
it is it is not a total ban on vaccine exports, and they should only last until March, but experts and observers fear that this will set a worrying precedent.
There are now several vaccines available, and more promising candidates on the way. But the EU-AstraZeneca rivalry is the latest sign that global cooperation and solidarity in vaccine allocation are failing, said Rebecca Weintraub, director of Harvard University’s Global Health Delivery Project.
“This is vaccine 101 nationalism,” she said.
The EU took longer to sign an agreement with AstraZeneca than the US and the UK. This delay may be causing problems now.
The European Union, on behalf of its 27 member states, has made deals with vaccine manufacturers, betting on a handful of potential candidates and buying doses in advance. In total, the EU bought 2.3 billion doses of vaccines from a handful of companies.
But initially, wealthier members of the EU, such as Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands, began negotiating deals with vaccine manufacturers themselves, including AstraZeneca. “It caused a lot of friction in Europe,” Christian Odendahl, chief economist at the Center for European Reform, told me. “If you are politically and economically integrated, you do not want to be vaccinated and your neighboring country does not want to be vaccinated.”
The bloc needed to ensure that smaller, less wealthy member states, without much purchasing power, could also obtain vaccines. The solution? Make the European Union itself take over the process of purchasing vaccines for all member states.
“But,” said Paulette Kurzer, a specialist in European policy and public health at the University of Arizona, it also made the whole thing “a very bureaucratically cumbersome process.” The EU had to consult with individual governments and balance all their interests. Other issues, such as liability protection and the cost of vaccines, also delayed discussions.
The European Union finally closed these agreements, with AstraZeneca and other vaccine manufacturers, but it was later on signing this contract with AstraZeneca than others, including the United Kingdom.
Advance to December, when the United Kingdom has become the first country in the world to authorize a vaccine (Pfizer-BioNtech) for emergency use. The US soon followed, but EU approval did not come at the end of December.
A few weeks behind some of its counterparts, the European Union’s vaccination campaign has remained slow compared to places like Israel and the United Kingdom.
The shortage of doses meant that EU countries had to reduce the rate of inoculation; Madrid, Spain, for example, is suspending its vaccination program this week. Germany’s health minister said the shortage may persist until July.
New doses of AstraZeneca would relieve some of that pressure. But then the bad news came, when AstraZeneca indicated that it would fall short of its initial commitment.
AstraZeneca’s CEO, Pascal Soriot, in an interview with the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, said that the company was working “24 hours a day, 7 days a week” to fix the “flaws” in its European production.
“But the contract with the UK was signed three months before the European vaccine agreement,” said Soriot. “So with the UK, we had an extra three months to fix all the flaws we experienced. As for Europe, we are three months late in correcting these flaws. ”
The EU, however, insisted that, according to the terms of the contract, AstraZeneca must use its manufacturing facilities in Britain to supply the EU with its portion of doses. But AstraZeneca says it must first fulfill its obligations to the United Kingdom before it can supply Europe or anywhere else. It is currently delivering about 2 million doses a week to the UK.
On Friday, AstraZeneca released its purchase agreement with the EU to try to help clear up the confusion. But it did not help much to resolve the dispute.
European commissioner Ursula von der Leyen said on Friday that it is “crystal clear” that the contract says AstraZeneca should use British factories to supply the EU, as its European production is at a standstill.
AstraZeneca, again, is saying that the contract says that it has made the “best reasonable effort” to comply with the dosage orders and that is what it is doing.
Therefore, the impasse between the EU and AstraZeneca remains.
In some ways, the details of the contract are beside the point. The European Union – which is facing a lot of pressure from its member states – is desperate to provide these vaccines to its citizens. And, as expected, the global demand for a vaccine is far exceeding supply and the pace at which companies can produce it.
The European public is frustrated with the launch of the vaccine. They see other countries being vaccinated more quickly. Each member state is responsible for implementing and distributing vaccination within its own borders, so blaming the EU for messing up the procurement process is a good way to deflect some of the blame from its citizens.
And AstraZeneca – with additional factories located so tantalizingly close in the former EU member state, the United Kingdom – is a useful target for the EU to take that blame a step further.
The EU is using its power to try to get vaccines, whatever the cost. This is exactly the type of vaccine nationalism that the world feared would occur.
The EU’s threat to block vaccine exports could directly harm the United Kingdom, which depends on a factory in Belgium for its doses of Pfizer vaccine. But other countries, like Canada, have raised concerns about whether their supplies could also be affected.
The biggest fear is that this could be the first domino to fall, as other countries feel they need to act in their own interests, and perhaps block exports or retain raw materials – any lever they can use to try doses of muscle vaccine to their populations.
“Our supply chains are global,” Julie Swann, a health systems and supply chain specialist at North Carolina State University, told me. “Although the manufacture of a supply chain can be in one part of the world, the raw materials or consumables or the assembly can be in a different location. This path is potentially dangerous to push as a main strategy. “
Experts said the world could see a repeat of the early days of the pandemic, when about 80 countries or customs territories banned or placed restrictions on the export of supplies.
“This could reignite the” impoverish neighbor “policies that characterized the early days of the pandemic in relation to personal protective equipment, ventilators and other medical supplies,” said Thomas J. Bollyky, senior researcher in global health, economics and development in the Foreign Affairs Council said.
The EU can consider this decision to be in your interest. But if other countries follow suit, the shot could backfire – in the EU and the rest of the world. Because it is almost certain to prolong the pandemic.
“It is making the huge gap between what people are saying and what they are doing increasingly clear,” Krishna Udayakumar, director of the Duke Global Health Innovation Center, told me. The EU, in particular, he said, is seen as a leader in global health equity. Much support is given to Covax, the multilateral effort to help poor countries get vaccinated. And yet, everyone is still taking care of themselves.
“At the end of the day,” he said, the EU is “doing everything possible to have access to vaccines as quickly as possible for its own population”.