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The EU may halt exports of Covid-19 vaccines to Britain to safeguard the meager doses for its own citizens unless the UK starts shipping vaccines to the bloc, the European Commission president said.
Ursula von der Leyen’s threat quickly produced a strong response from the UK, with Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab accusing the EU of engaging in risky politics of the kind exhibited by “less democratic countries”.
The president of the commission said that the EU wanted “to see reciprocity and proportionality in exports and we are ready to use whatever tools we need to comply with that.” He added: “It is about ensuring that Europe gets its fair share.”
Von der Leyen said the EU could activate Article 122 of the EU Treaty, an emergency clause that allows it to take exceptional measures, such as seizing vaccine production and suspending intellectual property rights, “if serious difficulties arise in the supply of certain products “for Member States.
“All options are on the table,” he said. “We are in the crisis of the century. We have to make sure that Europeans are vaccinated as soon as possible. Human lives, civil liberties and our economy depend on the speed of vaccination ”.
Von der Leyen said the EU had received more than 300 requests for vaccine shipments abroad in the past six weeks and rejected only one, and the bloc had exported 41 million doses to 33 countries.
“This shows that Europe is trying to make international cooperation work,” he said. “But open roads run in both directions … It is difficult to explain to our citizens why vaccines produced in the EU go to other countries that also produce vaccines, but almost nothing comes back.”
Von der Leyen said the bloc had exported 10 million doses to the UK in the last six weeks, making it “the number one country when it comes to EU exports.”
But while the UK was producing vaccines against AstraZeneca, and “there are even two sites in the UK that are in our contract for possible deliveries to the EU… we are still waiting for the doses to come from the UK. So this is an invitation to reciprocity ”.
Most of the vaccines exported from the EU to the UK have been manufactured by Pfizer, which distributes globally from its European production centers. The EU has blocked just one export request, a shipment of 250,000 doses of Oxford / AstraZeneca from Italy to Australia.
But Raab said he thought von der Leyen’s comments “require some explanation,” saying it would be wrong for the EU or any other state to interfere with “legally contracted supply” in comments on the sidelines of the Aspen conference.
“Frankly, I’m surprised we’re having this conversation,” Raab added. “It’s usually what the UK and the EU team up to reject when other countries with less democratic regimes than ours engage in that kind of risky politics.”
The foreign secretary said that he had been in contact with the EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, and the vice-president, Valdis Dombrovskis, and that the ministers had been “reliably informed that they were not aware of any plans to restrict the legally contracted supply. ”To the UK.
Von der Leyen previously said that while BioNTech / Pfizer and Moderna were meeting their contractual obligations to the block, AstraZeneca was on track to deliver just 30 million of its promised doses of 90 million in the first quarter and 70 million of the 180 million contracted in the second.
The British government has repeatedly said that it has not imposed an export ban on vaccine components or full doses, but ensured that the vaccine doses produced by Oxford / AstraZeneca at the Staffordshire and Oxford sites would supply Britain first.
The EU has been outraged by the Anglo-Swedish company’s refusal to redirect doses in light of the shortfall in production at its European facilities. AstraZeneca referred all questions about the dispute to the UK government.
If the vaccine supply situation does not change, Von der Leyen said, “we will have to reflect on how to make exports to vaccine-producing countries dependent on their level of openness. And on whether exports to countries that have higher vaccination rates than us continue to be proportionate ”.
He said that the US, which operates a formal export ban, was not a problem because “with the US there is reciprocity. There are no exports of vaccines from the US to the EU, but there are also no exports from the EU to the US, and there is a continuous flow of pre-products and raw materials. “
