BERLIN (AP) – The pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca has agreed to deliver 9 million additional doses of the coronavirus vaccine to the European Union during the first quarter, the bloc’s executive said on Sunday.
The new target of 40 million doses by the end of March is still only half of what the British-Swedish company originally intended before announcing a shortage due to production problems, which caused a wave between AstraZeneca and the EU last week. .
Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, said on Sunday after a call with seven vaccine manufacturers that AstraZeneca would also deliver a week earlier than planned and expand its manufacturing capacity in Europe.
“Step forward on vaccines,” tweeted Von der Leyen, who has come under tremendous pressure over the handling of European Commission vaccine orders in recent days.
The EU is far behind Britain and the United States in getting its 450 million population vaccinated against the virus. The slow rollout was blamed on a series of national problems, as well as slower authorization of the vaccines and an initial shortage of supplies.
AstraZeneca’s announcement last week that it would initially deliver only 31 million doses to the 27 EU member states due to production problems has caused a heated dispute between the two parties, and officials in Brussels said they feared the company would block treated unfairly. compared to other customers, such as the UK.
On Friday, hours after regulators approved the vaccine for use across the EU, the commission said it was tightening export rules of coronavirus vaccines, which provoked an angry reaction from Britain. The commission has since made it clear that the new measure will not limit the vaccines produced in the bloc of 27 countries to Northern Ireland. the EU.
EU member states praised the group’s executive last year for signing numerous deals with vaccine manufacturers, saying the joint purchase with the combined market weight of the whole block ensured a fair distribution for all 27 countries at good prices.
Since then, the mood among many EU citizens towards Brussels has weakened, as countries outside the bloc advance in the race to vaccinate their populations.
The British government was not ashamed to promote its relative vaccine success, which helped to deduce from the fact that the country remains at the top of the table for deaths in Europe.
Official figures show that 598,389 shots were fired in the UK on Saturday, more than six times the number Germany scored on Friday, the last day for which figures were available.
Germany has so far given at least one dose to 2.2% of its population. Britain did the same for 13.2% of its citizens.
In response, Chancellor Angela Merkel summoned state governors on Monday to discuss what German media described as a “vaccination debacle. ”
Von der Leyen, who was Germany’s defense minister before taking office in Brussels, maintained that the EU had ‘made good progress’.
“Of course we are currently in a difficult phase,” she told German public broadcaster ZDF, but added that more vaccine will be available in the second quarter as regulators approve additional formulas and further production capacity goes online.
Pfizer, which has partnered with German firm BioNTech to develop the first widely tested and approved coronavirus vaccine, said it expects world production to increase from 1.3 million doses to 2 billion doses this year. Tens of millions of people are likely to go to the EU.
In a statement, the European Commission said it intended to set up a specialized agency to improve the group’s response to health emergencies and “provide a more structured approach to pandemic preparedness.” ‘
As part of the effort, the EU, together with industry, said it would “finance vaccine design and development and scale up production in the short and medium term, and also target COVID-19 variants.”
“The pandemic has highlighted that manufacturing capacity is a limiting factor,” he said. “It is essential to address these challenges.”
___
Follow AP’s pandemic coverage at: https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic and https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-vaccine