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Following AstraZeneca’s announcement that it will deliver fewer vaccines than planned, Brussels is threatening to take legal action. In the responsible committee of the EU Commission, the manufacturer should now provide information on urgent matters.
By Ralph Sina, ARD-Studio Brussels
The EU and its member states have provided the pharmaceutical industry with around 1 billion euros to develop a corona vaccine. But when it comes to vaccination, non-European Union countries are ahead. Israel, for example. The US and the EU’s direct neighbor, Great Britain.
In the UK alone, more people were vaccinated in the past three days than in France during the entire corona epidemic, British Health Minister Matt Hancock argued. And pretend there was a vaccine available at the start of the corona pandemic. The truth, however, is that three-quarters of people over the age of 80 in Great Britain have already been vaccinated.
A decision is expected from the pharmaceutical agency EMA
No EU member state has been successful in doing this so far. However, the UK also benefits from the extradition policy of the British-Swedish group AstraZeneca. It has been supplying Britain with the corona vaccine without any restrictions since the beginning of December. It is not yet approved in the EU. By this Friday, the European Medicines Agency EMA wants to decide whether to give the green light.
But even if it does so this week, AstraZeneca will deliver around 60 percent fewer vaccines to the EU than promised by contract last year. “The fact that the UK continues to deliver as planned and that the European Union is cutting back,” says European politician and vaccine expert Peter Liese as a provocation. If the Swedish-British company doesn’t get inventory from its British warehouses to continental Europe very quickly, then Liese told him ARD Studio Brussels, “She has the biggest problem with the EU.”
The EU is AstraZeneca’s largest customer
It is not clear what this “biggest nuisance” should look like in concrete terms. Because the contract with AstraZeneca, which the EU Commission concluded last August for more than 300 million doses of vaccines with an option for another 100 million, is being kept under lock and key by the team of the president of the Commission of the UE, Ursula von der Leyen. It is not clear when AstraZeneca will have to be responsible for late deliveries. Only if commitments have not been met by the end of the quarter? Or also in the case of delivery fluctuations within the three-month cycles?
One thing is for sure: the EU is AstraZeneca’s biggest customer. Von der Leyen’s team had already agreed with the British-Swedish company in October to start vaccine production immediately. So regardless of the approval of the European Medicines Agency. Only now, almost three months later, the company reports on production problems in the EU. The question is how many doses of vaccine were produced in the last year, where are they stored, and when will they be delivered.
Council President Michel: EU hopes treaty will be honored
The President of the Council of the EU, Charles Michel, speaks of great impatience among the population. The entire population is experiencing obstacles in vaccine production and vaccination.
The EU expects that contracts confirmed by pharmaceutical companies will be honored, Michel emphasized to the French television station Europe 1. To ensure compliance with contracts, the EU can also use legal means, stressed in more detail the president of the Council of the EU to go.
The von der Leyen team expects AstraZeneca to present a detailed delivery schedule today to the responsible committee of the EU Commission. And the Commission and the member states answered the question of who actually received the doses of vaccine that the EU ordered in August and that AstraZeneca had produced from October until the end of the year. So in those two months in which there was no talk of production problems at the manufacturer.
