EU Says AstraZeneca to Deliver 9 Million More Vaccine Doses

AstraZeneca Plc will deliver 9 million additional vaccine doses to the European Union in the first quarter of this year, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Sunday.

The company will start deliveries one week earlier than scheduled and expand its manufacturing capacity in Europe, von der Leyen said on Twitter. The extra doses will bring the total to 40 million for the first quarter, she said.

AstraZeneca previously said that issues at a plant in Belgium meant deliveries this quarter would be less than half of what was initially planned. The relatively slow start of the EU’s immunization drive led to a messypolitical dispute last week over European export restrictions on vaccines.

The EU on Friday said that it would ban vaccine exports if drugmakers failed to meet delivery targets. The measure was taken following criticism of a slow rollout of national vaccination programs in the bloc. While Astra’s additional doses mark an improvement, they still fall far short of what the EU was hoping to get in the first quarter, especially as the vaccine was seen as central to many government’s inoculation strategies.

The EU’s drug regulator cleared the Covid-19 vaccine from AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford on Friday. It’ll be the third vaccine available in the EU after shots fromPfizer Inc. andModerna Inc., potentially easing a shortage of shots as the EU trails the U.K. and the U.S. in vaccinations.

So far, the EU’s 27 governments have administered just 2.6 doses of vaccine per 100 people, far behind the 12.5 doses in the U.K. and 8.8 in the U.S. Furthermore, hiccups in the supply of the highly anticipated AstraZeneca vaccine have cast serious doubts over the bloc’s ability to meet its ambitious inoculation targets.

Better Prepared

News of the extra doses came shortly after the EU said it’s taking steps to bolster its pandemic preparedness, citing the risk posed by Covid variants that reduce the efficacy of vaccines.

Von der Leyen on Sunday held a video call with chief executives of pharmaceutical companies including AstraZeneca and Moderna to discuss how vaccines could be more rapidly deployed, manufactured and approved in the future.

“The pandemic highlighted that manufacturing capacities are a limiting factor. It is essential to address these challenges,” the commission said in a statement after the call. It added that “the emergence of variants of concern raises the imminent threat of reduced efficacy of recently approved vaccines.”

Sunday’s discussion between von der Leyen and the pharmaceutical executives focused on the EU’s longer term health strategy and preparedness. Inspired by early stumbles in curbing the spread of the coronavirus last year, the push for a common approach aims to guard against a patchwork of national responses to any future health scares.

The discussion follows proposals by the commission last November to beef up the EU’s health agencies, after the pandemic overwhelmed the continent’s hospitals and left countries struggling with supply shortages. The plans included giving more clout to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control and the European Medicines Agency.

Also included in the meeting were executives from BioNTech SE, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, CureVac NV and Sanofi, according to the statement.

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