A vial containing the Oxford University / AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine will be seen at the Lochee Health Center in Dundee, Scotland, UK, on 4 January 2021.
Andy Buchanan | Swimming Pool | Reuters
The European vaccination against Covid-19 took another hit on Friday when AstraZeneca said initial deliveries to the region would be less than target volumes due to production shortages.
“Initial volumes will be lower than originally expected, due to lower yields at a manufacturing site in our European supply chain,” a company spokesman said in a written statement and declined to provide details.
The weakening strikes a European vaccination campaign already hampered by a temporary supply chain shortage of vaccine developers Pfizer and BioNTech, which is rebuilding a site in Belgium to increase production.
The EU Commission said Astra had notified the EU Vaccine Steering Board of a change in its delivery schedule and that the Commission was working to find out more.
While BioNTech’s product, as well as a vaccine manufactured by the US biotechnology firm Moderna, has already been launched after regulatory approval, an EU decision approving Astra’s compound is expected by the end of January. .
“We will be delivering tens of millions of doses to the European Union in February and March as we continue to push up production volumes,” said the British drugmaker, which is working with the University of Oxford. The spokesperson would not provide the initial volume target.
The EU has agreed to buy at least 300 million doses of Astra, with an option for an extra 100 million, as part of the company’s global commitments to deliver more than 3 billion doses.
Austrian Health Minister Rudolf Anschober warned AstraZeneca that any delay would be ‘absolutely unacceptable’, although he no longer confirmed that reports in the Austrian media confirmed that the company had told the country that in the first quarter only 600,000 vaccine doses could not be given, rather than the 2 million originally planned.
“The agreed delivery rates should remain,” Anschober said in a statement after media reports, including the newspaper Kurier and the national news agency APA.
Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said on Monday he and his counterparts from Denmark and Greece would put pressure on the European Medicines Agency to approve the AstraZeneca vaccination quickly. The Baltic states and the Czech Republic joined.