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Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz hinted on Friday that some EU members may have signed “secret contracts” with vaccine companies to receive more doses than they are entitled to under the bloc’s joint agreements.
Kurz and four of his colleagues sent a letter to the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and the president of the European Council, Charles Michel, on Friday. The letter states that “pharmaceutical companies do not evenly distribute vaccine doses to individual EU members.”
“If this system survives, … it will lead to huge differences between Member States for the summer, some of which will lead to this [šalys] you will be able to achieve herd immunity in a few weeks, while others will be far behind, the letter says. “Therefore, we urge you … to have a leadership discussion on this important issue as soon as possible.”
A representative of the European Commission said that the institution had received the letter and that “we are now examining it and will respond in due course.”
“Bazaar”
Kurz spoke on Friday of a “market” where some member states have concluded additional deals with vaccine companies, but an EU spokesman said countries could “request more or less a specific vaccine.”
However, the Austrian Ministry of Health rejected Mr Kurz’s statements and reiterated the EU statement that each Member State could indicate how many different doses of vaccines it wishes to buy.
“They were very proportionate and transparent negotiations,” Secretary General Inés Stilling told the public broadcaster on Saturday.
However, Czech Prime Minister Andrei Babish wrote on Twitter on Saturday that until the vaccination is large enough to stop the spread of the virus, “stocks should be distributed among [ES] Member States according to their population ‘.
The EU blames supply and delivery problems for the slow pace of its vaccination campaign. The bloc lags far behind the US, Israel and the UK in terms of the percentage of people vaccinated with at least one dose.
