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AstraZeneca withdrew from a meeting with the European Union scheduled for Wednesday to discuss supplies of the COVID-19 vaccine, an EU official said. The official added that the EU continues to ask the company for further explanations on its announcement to reduce deliveries of vaccines to the EU in the first quarter.
Previously, AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot attributed the vaccine delivery shortfall in Europe to initial production problems and the EU’s delay in signing a contract with the Swedish pharmaceutical company.
Soriot said he understands the frustration with his company, but responded to claims that its cut in delivery of vaccine doses to the EU allowed it to prioritize the UK and other customers.
The European Commission has described vaccine delivery delays – 40 percent below targets in March – as “unacceptable”, and some EU member states are threatening legal action.
Soriot said such threats are unfounded, stating that his company had always promised its “best effort” to supply the EU in parallel with the UK.
The company’s problems at EU production plants in the Netherlands and Belgium, he said, are due to lower production in some production tanks containing vaccine culture.
“We had similar initial problems in the UK, but the contract with the British was signed three months earlier with Brussels and we had three more months to resolve the problems,” he told Germany’s Die Welt newspaper and Italy’s La Repubblica.
AstraZeneca’s chief executive said his company was not profiting or raising prices as it had committed to producing the vaccine in conjunction with the non-profit University of Oxford. The French-born manager would also not tolerate any preferred treatment for clients from outside the EU.
“I am European, our president is too, as is our finance chief,” he said.
Regarding claims in the German media that the vaccine was only 8 percent effective in the elderly population, Soriot said he had “no idea” where those claims came from.
“How can you assume that testing bodies around the world would license a substance that is only eight percent effective?” He asked.
The company’s vaccine is already being used in the UK, and EU medical approval is likely to follow next week.
Pending approval, the company will deliver three million doses to the EU, increasing each week to reach a limit of 17 million every seven days. The doses will be divided and distributed throughout the EU based on the size of the population.
Questioning the efficacy of the vaccine, he warned, was a gift to the anti-vaccine movements that are gaining momentum across the continent.
“Whoever has something to say about safety or efficacy should do so in scientific circles, it is a shame to do so by political means because it reduces confidence in vaccination,” he said.
Among the concerns raised about the efficacy of the vaccine were that only eight percent of the subjects in the Oxford vaccine trials were between 56 and 69 years of age, and only three to four percent were over 70 years.
Soriot said there are ethical reasons behind the low number of older test subjects.
“Oxford … didn’t want to test older people until they had enough data from the 18 to 55 age group,” he said. “But we have strong data showing strong antibody production against the virus among older people.”
He said it was too early to tell whether the company’s vaccine would protect against virus mutations already in circulation.
Politicians across Europe have backed calls to introduce vaccine export permits, amid concerns that EU-based AstraZeneca factories were prioritizing production for other areas of the world at the expense of Europeans.
Soriot said that talking about export restrictions was “the exact opposite” of the commitments made by the European Commission in recent months. Such proposals for its EU production facilities, he added, run the risk of undermining the company’s international delivery chain.
The French executive suggested that the lack of global preparedness for pandemics, and the consequent slippage in nationalist instincts, was the main challenge to face the pandemic.
Vaccine development in record time “could have been on July 4, Independence Day, but unfortunately it wasn’t because there was a bit of ‘me first’ behavior,” he told a virtual panel at the World Economic Forum. .
In addition to a battle with Brussels, the Swedish company is being sued by a pension fund on behalf of its investors, alleging that it suffered losses due to failure of the company’s testing of its coronavirus vaccine.
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