EU-AstraZeneca vaccine row worsens

THE European Union’s dispute with AstraZeneca over vaccine supplies intensified yesterday as the drugmaker defended itself against claims that it had reneged on contractual commitments.

AstraZeneca Chief Executive Pascal Soriot addressed the dispute for the first time, rejecting the EU’s assertion that the company was failing to honor its commitments to deliver coronavirus vaccines.

Soriot said delivery figures in AstraZeneca’s contract with the 27-nation bloc were targets, not firm commitments, and they couldn’t be met because of problems in rapidly expanding production capacity.

“Our contract is

not

a contractual commitment,” Soriot said in an interview with the Italian newspaper La Repubblica.

“It’s a best effort. Basically we said we’re going to try our best, but we can’t guarantee we’re going to succeed. In fact, getting there, we are a little bit delayed.”

After the interview was published, an EU spokesperson said AstraZeneca had pulled out of talks yesterday about problems with vaccine supplies, which AstraZeneca immediately denied. Hours later, the EU said their talks were back on.

Stella Kyriakides, the European Commissioner for health and food safety, rejected Soriot’s explanation for the delays, saying that “not being able to ensure manufacturing capacity is against the letter and spirit of our agreement.”

AstraZeneca said last week that it planned to cut initial deliveries in the EU to 31 million doses from 80 million due to reduced yields from its manufacturing process in Europe.

That drew an angry response from the EU, which says it expects the company to deliver the full amount on time.

Soriot said AstraZeneca had to reduce deliveries to the EU because plants in Europe had lower than expected yields from the biological process used to produce the vaccine, which has also happened in other regions as the company sought to rapidly expand production capacity to meet demands.

The EU has signed deals for six different vaccines, but so far drug regulators have only authorized the use of the two, one made by Pfizer/BioNTech and another by Moderna. They will consider the AstraZeneca vaccine tomorrow.

The EU, which has 450 million citizens and the economic and political clout of the world’s biggest trading bloc, is lagging badly behind countries like Israel and Britain in rolling out coronavirus vaccine shots for its health-care workers and most vulnerable people.