BRUSSELS (AP) – Amid signs that more contagious coronavirus variants are spreading unnoticed in Europe, governments and EU leaders on Wednesday scrambled to speed up vaccine efforts hampered by limited supplies and fund ways to hunt and combat variants work.
The European Union announced on Wednesday that it had agreed to buy another 300 million doses of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine and inject almost a quarter of a billion euros (almost $ 300 million) to fight virus variants.
The news comes just hours after Pfizer and BioNTech said they had signed an agreement to deliver an additional dose of 200 million vaccines to the group.
The European Commission said its second contract with Moderna provides for an additional purchase of 150 million doses in 2021 and an option to purchase 150 million more doses in 2022.
“With a portfolio of up to 2.6 billion doses, we can not only vaccinate our citizens, but also our neighbors and partners,” said EU Commissioner Ursula von der Leyen.
Von der Leyen and her team have come under fire for handling the EU vaccine procurement process. While the bloc of 27 nations began vaccinating its 450 million citizens almost two months ago, it is still far behind Britain, the United States and others in the section of the population that has been reached.
Von der Leyen also announced EU plans to better detect virus variants and speed up the approval of modified vaccines that can combat them.
As the UK virus variant wants to become dominant in the EU, the executive has said it will spend at least 75 million euros to support genomic sequencing and develop specialized tests for new variants. Another 150 million euros will be allocated to research and data exchange.
“Our priority is to ensure that all Europeans have access to safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines as soon as possible,” von der Leyen said. “At the same time, new variants of the virus are emerging rapidly and we need to adapt our response even faster.”
The German health minister said the virus variant, which was first detected in Britain last year, now accounts for more than a fifth of all positive tests in his country, and from 6% to more than 22% in just two weeks has risen.
In Slovakia, which currently has the most virus deaths per world population, authorities have found the British variant in 74% of its positive samples.
The Danish Minister of Health, Magnus Heunicke, said that in the second week of February, the British variant represented 45% of its analyzed cases and predicted that by early March it would represent 80% of Danish infections.
Scientists say the UK variant is more easily spread and is likely to be more lethal, but so far existing vaccines appear to be effective against it. However, another variant that was first detected in South Africa showed signs that they could evade the immune response caused by the AstraZeneca vaccine.
Authorities in Germany’s most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia, have expressed concern that some people were less willing to take the AstraZeneca vaccine than those made by Moderna or Pfizer.
“The authorized AstraZeneca vaccine is not a second-class vaccine,” the health ministry said. “The vaccine shows good efficacy and is well tolerated.”
The reluctance towards the AstraZeneca vaccine, which is only given to people under 65 in Germany, has been reinforced by reports that some people had fever and headaches after getting the shot. Officials say such reactions are normal after vaccinations, and show that the body’s immune system reacts and should disappear after a day or two.
Health Minister Jens Spahn said if people did not want to get an AstraZeneca opportunity, he and others would be happy to take it.
“If people who are offered it do not take it, then we will offer it to the next person,” he said. He noted that Germany and the EU are still short of vaccines.
Pfizer and German partner BioNTech have confirmed that they too have reached an agreement to give the EU another 200 million vaccine doses.
The two companies said the doses – expected to be delivered this year, about 75 million of them in the second quarter, will be on top of the 300 million vaccine doses the group initially ordered. The EU has an option to request a further 100 million doses.
In Europe, vaccine shortages are a major problem.
Last month, Pfizer said it was temporarily reducing deliveries to Europe and Canada, while improving production capacity at its plant in Belgium. The EU also had a public conversation with AstraZeneca because it received fewer of its vaccine shots than expected. AstraZeneca’s chief blamed the delay on new factories that have to work out problems with vaccine production.
According to the largest coronavirus expert in Spain, it does not make sense at the current levels of vaccine supply to set up massive facilities for administering the samples, and this reflects comments by US governors, who also have a shortage of vaccines in their states. has.
The European Medicines Agency, meanwhile, said it could issue an opinion in mid-March on a fourth vaccine, a single version by Johnson & Johnson. The three other EU-approved vaccines require two shots at different weeks.
Von der Leyen said the EU had bought more doses than needed because it wanted to give shots to its neighbors “from the Eastern Partnership to the Western Balkans to Africa” - although some of the countries had already opted for vaccinations from Russia and China after losing to richer countries in the early bid for vaccines.
Authorities in Berlin on Wednesday opened the capital’s fifth coronavirus vaccination center, located in an indoor cycling arena. The sprawling Velodrome started with just 120 vaccinations, but officials hope to increase it to 2,200 a day.
“We can not complain,” said Dieter Krueger, who was waiting with Ilse, his wife of 60 years, in the recovery room after receiving a Moderna vaccine shot. “Things are looking up.”
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Jordans contributed from Berlin. Geir Moulson in Berlin, Jan M. Olsen on Copenhagen and Aritz Parra in Madrid contributed to this report.
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