AstraZeneca to supply EU with 9 million more vaccine doses

New target of 40 million doses is still only half of what drug maker was aiming for

A health professional holding a vial of the AstraZeneca vaccine. Reuters

Pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca has agreed to supply nine million more doses of its coronavirus vaccine to the EU before April, the bloc’s executive arm said Sunday.

The new target of 40 million doses is still only half of what the British-Swedish company had originally aimed for before it announced a shortfall due to production problems.

That announcement sparked a dispute between AstraZeneca and the EU last week.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said after a call with seven vaccine makers on Sunday that AstraZeneca would also begin deliveries one week sooner than scheduled and expand its manufacturing capacity in Europe.

“Step forward on vaccines,” tweeted Ms von der Leyen, who has come under intense pressure over the commission’s handling of the vaccine orders in recent days.

The EU is far behind Britain and the US in getting its population of 450 million vaccinated against the virus.

The slow introduction has been blamed national problems, slower authorisation of the vaccines and an initial shortage of supply.

AstraZeneca’s announcement last week that it would initially supply only 31 million doses to the EU’s 27 member states due to production problems set off a fierce dispute between the two.

Officials in Brussels said they feared the company was treating the bloc unfairly compared to other customers, such as the UK.

On Friday, hours after regulators authorised the vaccine for use across the EU, the commission said it was tightening rules on exports of doses, sparking an angry response from Britain.

The commission has since made it clear that the new measure would not limit vaccine shipments produced in the 27-nation bloc to Northern Ireland.

EU member states praised the bloc’s executive branch last year for signing several deals with vaccine makers.

They said the joint purchase using the combined market weight of the bloc had ensured a fair distribution for all 27 countries at good prices.

Since then the mood among many EU citizens towards Brussels has soured, as countries outside the bloc speed ahead in the race to vaccinate their populations.

The British government has not been shy about promoting its vaccine success, which has helped to distract from the fact that the country has had the most deaths in Europe.

Official figures show 598,389 shots were administered across the UK on Saturday, more than six times the number that Germany managed Friday, the last day for which figures were available.

Germany has so far given at least one dose to 2.2 per cent of its population, compared with Britain's 13.2 per cent.

Chancellor Angela Merkel has summoned state governors on Monday to discuss what German media are calling a “vaccination debacle. “

Ms von der Leyen, who was Germany’s defence minister before taking the post in Brussels, insisted the EU had “made good progress".

“Of course we’ve currently got a difficult phase,” she told German public broadcaster ZDF.

But Ms von der Leyen said that in the second quarter, more vaccine would become available as regulators approved additional formulas and further production capacity went online.

Pfizer, which developed the first widely tested and approved coronavirus vaccine with German firm BioNTech, has said it expects to increase global production this year from 1.3 million doses to 2 billion doses.

Tens of millions of those will probably go to the EU.

The European Commission said it planned to set up a specialised body to improve the bloc’s response to health emergency and “deliver a more structured approach to pandemic preparedness".

As part of the effort, together with industry, the EU said it would “fund design and development of vaccines and scale up manufacturing in the short and medium term, and also to target the variants of Covid-19.”

“The pandemic highlighted that manufacturing capacities are a limiting factor,” it said. “It is essential to address these challenges.”