Oxford/AstraZeneca Vaccine Supply To Be Cut By 60% In The EU
- by Virginia Carter
- in World Media
- — Jan 24, 2021
The shortfall comes as European leaders face heightened scrutiny over what critics say has been a slower rollout of several Western-developed vaccines than in the U.S. and U.K. It also comes after European officials clashed this week with Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE over the companies' decision to cut their own planned deliveries of Covid-19 vaccines to the bloc.
It now expects to deliver around 31 million doses to the European Union in February and March.
"The EU Commission and Member States expressed deep dissatisfaction with this", Stella Kyriakides tweeted on Friday after member states heard from AstraZeneca representatives.
"We insisted on a precise delivery schedule on the basis of which Member States should be planning their vaccination programs", she said.
"We are determined to provide more predictability and stability to the delivery process, and we look forward to more vaccines and more doses coming on stream soon", Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen said on Thursday.
Hungary are not the first country to break away from the European Union program as Denmark carried out separate negotiations with Pfizer/BioNTech to receive more vaccines in the initial batches.
The European Commission has drawn up a contract with AstraZeneca for 400 million doses of the vaccine.
It has already received emergency authorisation in Britain.
It was not clear how many doses AstraZeneca had initially been expected to deliver to the 27-country bloc.
Hungary's foreign minister said the country had procured two million doses of the Russian coronavirus vaccine.
Friday's announcement by the British pharmaceutical firm followed another last week by Pfizer, which said it would delay shipments of its vaccine for up to a month due to works at its key plant in Belgium.
The European Union has so far approved vaccines from Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech as well as from USA company Moderna.
The AstraZeneca vaccine has the advantage of being cheaper to produce and being simpler to store and transport than its rivals.
However, Reuters has confirmed that the company is set to cut the EU's vaccine delivery by 60%, meaning that only 31m of the promised doses are set to arrive on time.
"Vaccine production in Europe develops too late and too slowly", Lauterbeck told Tegesipagel, "America has more vaccines than vaccines, it's the other way around in Europe", he told the EU.
Despite the issue, the Fianna Fail leader said the Government still aims to be in a "mass vaccination scenario" by the end of June.
