The case of vaccines is shaking Europe. Prime Minister Conte: legal initiatives ready – Corriere.it

The cut in the distribution of vaccine doses announced two days ago by AstraZeneca – which has not yet given the green light to the EMA, but is expected this week – alarmed the premier Giuseppe Conte: The latest news reaching us from the manufacturers of anti-Covid vaccines is worrying, he wrote on Facebook, explaining that if the 60% reduction of the doses to be distributed in the first quarter was confirmed (from AstraZeneca, ed) it would mean that in Italy 3.4 million doses would be administered instead of 8 million. This is why the premier threatened to use all the tools and all the legal initiatives against AstraZeneca as we are already doing with Pfizer-BioNTech, to demand compliance with contractual commitments.

Rome is not the only one worried, fears are shared with the European Commission and other capitals, as emerged on Friday at the end of the meeting of the steering committee on vaccination strategy during which representatives of AstraZeneca announced delays in the delivery of vaccines against Covid-19 compared to what was expected for the first quarter of 2021. The Commissioner of The EU for Health, Stella Kyriakides, had immediately expressed with a tweet the deep discontent of the participants at the table explaining that the Commission will continue to insist with AstraZeneca to have measures that increase the degree of predictability and stability in deliveries and to accelerate dose distribution. A steering committee meeting has been called for tomorrow to discuss delivery delays with AstraZeneca. The Commission intends to exert pressure on the fulfillment of the supplies foreseen in the contracts. States need a precise delivery schedule in order to organize vaccination plans. In the strategy presented by the Commission is the objective of reaching 70% of the population by summer.

Meanwhile, on the Pfizer front, based on contacts between Brussels and the pharmaceutical group it follows that the slowdown in distribution should be overcome next week and that the administration of the average dose for two weeks (this and the next) should return to 92%. While the rest should be reabsorbed in mid-February. It remains the knot of counting the sixth dose contained in a bottle. In Europe, on January 8, the EMA, the European Medicines Agency, recommended updating the product information to clarify that each vial contains 6 doses of the vaccine. While in the United States, although there has been talk since December, this aspect has only now been clarified, which will affect the calculation of the doses that Pfizer will deliver to the United States. The pharmaceutical group, reports the New York Times, convinced to Food and Drug Administration modify the terms of the agreement and calculate the supplies in doses and not in vials. The sixth extra dose will be counted as part of the commitment already assumed for the delivery of 200 million doses to the US health authorities at the end of July: therefore, the company will deliver fewer vials than initially planned. the Now However, he notes that doctors still struggle to reliably extract the sixth dose. In Italy, problems related to the type of precision syringe to use were also found.