The health Commissioner Stella Kyriakides stated that the EU will take any action required to take to protect its citizens, this comes with the warning that the EU will tighten its rules on the export of the Covid 19 vaccine.
The EU has been getting a lot of criticism for not being able to roll out the vaccine on time and being slow with production as well, it was here that AstraZeneca informed the EU that there are production issues with the vaccine hence the reason it has been taking so long to supply.
The EU is now in a fight with AstraZeneca and it is affecting the supplies to the UK of the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine that was developed by the US and Germany as it is the Belgian plant that supplies the UK, “Our vaccine supply and scheduled deliveries will fully support offering the first dose to all four priority groups by 15 February,” a government spokeswoman said. There are also some nations threatening legal action and inoculation programmes have either slowed or stopped at this point.
What did the EU health commissioner say?
The health commissioner Ms. Kyriakides took to tweeter and stated that “resulted in dissatisfaction with the lack of clarity and insufficient explanations. EU member states are united: vaccine developers have societal and contractual responsibilities they need to uphold”. She further said that the EU has made it clear to AstraZeneca that they should be provided with a detailed planning of vaccine deliveries at the next meeting.
AstraZeneca has still not made a public comment on the matter even after the warning of the health commissioner to the future developers of the vaccines stating that there should be early notification provided in case they want to export to other countries.
What about AstraZeneca’s delivery delays?
It was just last week that AstraZeneca claimed a production problem where a many of the first doses that were originally available to the eu member states were lowered that expected. There was supposedly a delivery of nearly 80 million vaccines that should have gone out to the 27 states by March. But there has not been a public official communication as to how much of a shirt fall it would be but it was said that of about 60% roughly.
