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On the first day of the virtual summit of the European Union (EU), which will culminate this Friday, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, announced that the pharmaceutical AstraZeneca will not be able to continue with exports until it complies with the contracts acquired among the 27 member countries of the bloc. The community partners also agreed to increase the production of new doses and improve their distribution within the EU.
The European Union (EU) tightened its measures to prevent what it considers to be leaking vaccines against the pandemic outside the 27 member countries of the community bloc.
“I think it is clear for the company that, first of all, it has to catch up, it has to fulfill the contract it has with the European member states, before it can go back to exporting vaccines,” he said Thursday. at a press conference, the President of the European Commission, Ursula Von der Leyen.
The pronouncement against one of the pharmaceutical companies that has given the world one of the vaccines to stop the pandemic is presented due to its alleged breaches in the delivery schedule.
According to Brussels, since last February more than 41 million doses have been registered from the community block, including 11 million to the United Kingdom and a million and a half to Saudi Arabia, countries that lead the vaccination programs against the pandemic, along with Israel, the United States and Chile.
The EU in particular accuses AstraZeneca of delivering to Europeans only 30 of the promised 120 million doses, during the first quarter of 2021.
“We want to explain to our European citizens that they get their fair share (…) And this is, of course, the case of AstraZeneca,” confirmed Von der Leyen.
Already on Wednesday, the bloc announced that it is strengthening the antidote export control mechanism. A situation that makes him special confrontation with one of its former members: the United Kingdom.
“The reality is that in recent weeks the European Union has sent more vaccines to the United Kingdom than to Spain and more to Saudi Arabia than to the Baltic countries,” lamented Manfred Weber, the leader in the European Parliament of the People’s Party.
French President Emmanuel Macron made clear his support for this position. “It is the end of naivety. (…) I support the export control mechanisms established by the European Commission. I support the fact that we must block all exports while some pharmaceutical companies do not respect their commitments to Europeans,” said the president. French at the end of the first day of the meeting.
However, German Chancellor Angela Merkel advocated for a win-win solution to the dispute. “On the one hand, we are inclined to respect global supply chains and we want to fight protectionism, but of course we also want to protect our own people because we know that this is the way out of the crisis,” said the German leader.
The EU agrees to increase vaccine production
The 27 also pledged to increase the production of new doses of vaccines and improve their distribution within the European community.
“It is absolutely vital, of course, that we continue to work to improve vaccine production in Europe and improve our ability to distribute them to member states (…) This is our absolute priority and we are fully dedicated to that task together with the European Commission.” European Council President Charles Michel said at a press conference after chairing Thursday’s meeting.
However, Merkel, a scientist by profession, emphasized that the increase in the production of more antidotes will be key not only to distribute them within the EU, but also in the rest of the world, since if the reach of the drugs is not achieved There will be more variants of the virus around the world.
“If we do not get the vaccines to reach the whole world, we will have mutations in other regions that can come back to us and can be more resistant,” he warned.
The bloc is immersed in the third wave of the pandemic and has had to stop vaccination programs in several countries, due to the shortage of vaccines, which it tries to alleviate by strengthening the export restrictions that it had announced last January.
The problem is compounded by the lack of doses of AstraZeneca, a vaccine that several European members such as Austria had opted for. The situation forces us to rethink the distribution of other vaccines, including that of Pfizer / BioNTech.
It is expected that in the second and final round of the summit, on Friday, the European Union will delve into the launch of the so-called vaccination passport, which already has great political support.
The certificate would give free mobility access to EU citizens within the bloc countries.
So far, 88 million doses have been distributed across the Union and 62 million have been applied. This has served so that 18.2 million community citizens have received the two shots of the vaccines. The data is poor compared to other countries like the United States, since only 5% of the population is fully immunized.
With Reuters, AFP and local media
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source https://pledgetimes.com/the-european-union-warned-that-astrazeneca-will-not-be-able-to-export-vaccines-until-the-contract-is-fulfilled/
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