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The European Union (EU) is ready to help the German company BioNTech to increase the production of the vaccine against covid-19, given the bottlenecks that are occurring due to the global shortage of production capacity, according to the European Commissioner for Health, Stella Kyriakides.
“We understand that everyone is watching the rate of vaccination. The bottleneck right now not the volume of orders, but the lack of global production capacity. This is also true for BioNTech ”, said the commissioner in an interview with the German agency DPA published by its press service.
The vaccine developed by BioNTech with the American Pfizer is so far the only authorized in the EU and countries are currently facing a shortage to immunize the entire population, while criticism grows in some of them for the slowness of vaccination, particularly in Germany.
In this situation, BioNTech announced yesterday that will increase your production capacity and he attributed the current shortage in part to the EU’s purchasing policy in which the process has been slower than in other parts of the world.
The commissioner defended the strategy adopted by Brussels of investing from the beginning in several vaccines in development to ensure that countries had access to one that was effective.
“The situation will improve step by step. We have been negotiating to have additional doses of the BioNTech vaccine for a long time and we are ready again to help expand production capacity, ”he said in the interview.
The European Commission, which provided € 100 million in funding to BioNTech for the development of the vaccine, obtained 200 million doses of the same in December and has exercised an option to purchase an additional 100 million doses.
Kyriakides recalled that other manufacturers with whom the EU has contracts are about to see their vaccines approved and that, if all candidates receive the go-ahead, Europe will have more than 2 billion doses available. The doses achieved by Brussels are then distributed proportionally among the countries.
In addition to the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine, the European Medicines Agency plans to approve this month that of the Modern American, while the one developed by AstraZéneca and Oxford – which has already been authorized in the United Kingdom – has not yet applied for authorization in the EU, although it is expected to do so soon. EFE
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