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A warning from AstraZeneca that initial stocks of Covid-19 vaccines will be lower than expected has raised new concerns about vaccination rates, and some countries are planning to make a sharp decline in deliveries.
The British pharmaceutical firm’s announcement on Friday follows Pfizer’s previous week, which said the shipment of its vaccine would be delayed by up to a month due to work on its key plant in Belgium.
The warnings from the companies are worrying about the new Covid-19 variant, especially one that originated in Britain and is more contagious than the original kind.
Europe has now recorded more than 692,000 virus deaths and nearly 32 million infections.
The EU has so far approved vaccines from Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech as well as from the US company Moderna.
It has not yet approved the vaccine from AstraZeneca and its partner, the University of Oxford, but is expected to decide by 29 January.
AstraZeneca said in its statement that if an EU approval is granted, the ‘initial volumes will be lower than expected’, although the start would not be delayed.
The company blamed ‘reduced returns on manufacturing sites in our European supply chain’.
It said it would in any case provide ‘millions of doses’ to the EU while increasing it in February and March.
The announcement led to ‘deep dissatisfaction’ with EU member states, which ‘insisted on a precise delivery schedule’, said European Commissioner for Health and Food Safety Stella Kyriakides.
‘Very, very bad news’
Austrian health chief Rudolf Anschober called it “very, very bad news” and said his country would receive just over half of the 650,000 AstraZeneca doses he expected in February.
Lithuania said it expects an 80 percent reduction in AstraZeneca doses in the first quarter.
Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin said: “it could certainly have an impact on the broader vaccination program … It will disrupt our plans.”
However, some government officials have tried to reassure the people of their countries, who are tired and battered by the months of the pandemic, and who are already on track for the slow vaccination.
“We have new vaccines on the way. We have Pfizer, which is increasing its production capacity,” Agnès Pannier-Runacher, France’s deputy minister, told France Inter.
The EU initially ordered up to 400 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine.
In total, the EU has obtained contracts for more than two billion doses of vaccine for a total population of 450 million.
The AstraZeneca vaccine has the advantage of being cheaper to produce than its competitors, and also easier to store and transport.
‘Disappointment’
German Health Minister Jens Spahn also tried to downplay the announcement, saying there would be a delivery of AstraZeneca in a week after February’s expected approval.
“How much, we still have to clarify with AstraZeneca and the European Union in the coming days,” he said.
Sweden’s national vaccination coordinator, Richard Bergstrom, said he expected his country to receive about 700,000 doses in the first month after the vaccine was approved, compared to one million initially expected.
Norway, which is not an EU member but follows decisions made by the bloc’s drug regulator, has expressed ‘disappointment’.
The country’s FHI health authority now plans to receive only 200,000 doses of AstraZeneca in February – far less than the 1.12 million initially expected.
Meanwhile, the Pfizer delay announced last week continued to draw criticism.
Pfizer said on January 15 that adjustments at the Puurs factory are needed to sharpen vaccine production capacity from mid-February.
“We believe Pfizer is currently at fault,” Domenico Arcuri, Italy’s special commissioner for the pandemic, said in the La Stampa newspaper on Saturday, confirming that the country had planned to take legal action against the company.
“The 20 percent reduction in the Pfizer vaccine stock is not an estimate, but a sad certainty,” he said, adding that the health of Italians was not “negotiable”.
Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said in a Facebook post on Saturday that any delays in the vaccine supply amount to serious breaches of contractual agreements and cause “enormous damage” to Italy and other European countries.
French Foreign Minister Clément Beaune on Friday called on Pfizer to “honor its commitments”.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP)