Photographer: Dhiraj Singh / Bloomberg
Photographer: Dhiraj Singh / Bloomberg
Chancellor Angela Merkel will hold crisis talks on Monday with pharmaceutical executives, local German leaders and European Commission officials in an effort to speed up the continent’s faltering vaccine push.
The video call this afternoon in Berlin comes after Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the commission, announced it AstraZeneca Plc will supply 9 million additional vaccine doses to the European Union in the first quarter. The EU has been embroiled in a bitter dispute with the drugmaker since AstraZeneca said it was reducing the number of shots fired at the bloc due to production issues.
Von der Leyen said on Twitter late Sunday that the Anglo-Swedish drugmaker would start delivery a week earlier and expand production. The extra doses would total 40 million, just about half of what the EU expected from Astra by March.
Separate, Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE said on Monday that, as previously noted, they will produce another 75 million doses of their vaccine for the EU in the second quarter. The two companies are ‘back to the original vaccine dose delivery schedule’ to the EU following adjustments to a facility in Puurs, Belgium, BioNTech said.
“We are now in talks with additional qualified partners about possible new agreements” to further increase the capacity of our European manufacturing network, said Sierk Poetting, CFO of BioNTech, in an email statement.
EU lags behind vaccine race
Cumulative doses administered per 100 people
Source: Data Collected by Bloomberg
Read more: Faced with emergency vaccination, the EU has made an enemy of all
AstraZeneca caused a crisis on January 22 when it said that problems at a plant in Belgium meant that deliveries to the EU would be significantly curtailed this quarter. As a result, the bloc, which has come under fire due to the slow implementation of national vaccination programs, said it would start restricting vaccine exports if drugmakers did not meet delivery targets.
The episode turned into a bruise game that the EU of 27 countries voiced against the leverage of the pharmaceutical industry, raising fears that a spate of vaccine nationalism could hamper efforts to fight the pandemic. The bloc’s faltering vaccination program and the attempt to rectify early mistakes have drawn criticism from many quarters, including from companies such as AstraZeneca that it must combat the Covid crisis.
Export curbs could disrupt the supply chains of vaccines, as billions wait to be vaccinated before the spread of mutations makes the virus less vulnerable to the available shots.
“We want 70% of the adult population to be vaccinated by the end of the summer,” von der Leyen said on Sunday in an interview with German broadcaster ZDF. She added that inventory would increase significantly in the second quarter when Johnson & Johnson and other pharmaceutical companies overcome early hurdles. An Astra spokesman declined to comment on the additional deliveries.
Astra CEO Pascal Soriot said last week that the company was trying to obtain more supplies from around the world to increase deliveries to the EU, adding that “we are 24/7 increasing this capacity. “
So far, the 27 EU governments have administered just 2.8 doses of vaccine per 100 people, well behind the 14.2 doses in the UK and 9.7 in the US. over long home orders.
The EU drug regulator cleared the Covid-19 vaccine from AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford on Friday. It will be the third vaccine available in the EU after shots from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna Inc., which could potentially alleviate a shortage of shots as the EU vaccinates the UK and US.
In the ZDF interview, Von der Leyen said she spoke to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who said both would supply Astra production plants in Europe. “Our enemy is the virus and the pharmaceutical industry is part of the solution,” she said.
Better prepared
On Sunday, Von der Leyen held a video call with general managers of pharmaceutical companies, including AstraZeneca and Moderna, to discuss how vaccines can be deployed, manufactured and approved faster.
“The pandemic emphasized that manufacturing capacity is a limiting factor. It is essential to address these challenges, “the commission said in a statement. It adds that ‘the emergence of variants of concern poses an imminent threat to the diminished efficacy of recently approved vaccines.’
Sunday’s discussion focused on the EU’s strategy and longer-term preparedness. Inspired by early barriers to limiting the spread of the coronavirus last year, the pursuit of a general approach is aimed at protecting against a patchwork of national responses to future health concerns.
Also present at the meeting were executives from BioNTech, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, CureVac NV en Sanofi, according to the statement.
– With the help of Raymond Colitt, Frank Connelly and Nikos Chrysoloras