EU ADDS funds, doses to step up vaccination effort.
BRUSSELS — After signs that more infectious coronavirus variants are spreading unchecked across Europe, governments and EU leaders scrambled Wednesday to speed up vaccine efforts that have been hampered by limited supplies and to fund ways to hunt down variants and counter them.
The European Union announced Wednesday that it has agreed to buy a further 300 million doses of Moderna’s covid-19 vaccine and was injecting almost $300 million into efforts to combat virus variants.
The news came only hours after Pfizer and BioNTech said they had signed a deal to deliver an additional 200 million vaccine doses to the bloc.
The EU Commission said its second contract with Moderna provides for an additional purchase of 150 million doses in 2021 and an option to purchase 150 million more doses in 2022.
“With a portfolio of up to 2.6 billion doses, we will be able to provide vaccines not just to our citizens, but to our neighbors and partners as well,” EU Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen said.
Von der Leyen and her team have come under intense criticism for their handling of the EU’s vaccine procurement process. While the 27-nation bloc began vaccinating its 450 million citizens almost two months ago, it still lags far behind Britain, the United States, and others in the share of population reached.
Von der Leyen also unveiled EU plans to better detect virus variants and to speed up the approval of adapted vaccines capable of countering them.
As the U.K. virus variant looks set to become dominant in the EU, the executive arm said it will spend about $90 million to support genomic sequencing and develop specialized tests for new variants. Another $180 million will be allocated to research and data exchange.
“Our priority is to ensure that all Europeans have access to safe and effective covid-19 vaccines as soon as possible,” von der Leyen said. “At the same time, new variants of the virus are emerging fast and we must adapt our response even faster.”
Germany’s health minister said the virus variant first detected in Britain last year now accounts for more than a fifth of all positive tests in his country, rising from 6% to more than 22% in just two weeks.
In Slovakia, which now has the highest rate of virus deaths per population in the world, authorities found the U.K. variant in 74% of its positive samples.
Danish Health Minister Magnus Heunicke said the U.K. variant represented 45% of its analyzed cases in the second week of February and predicted it will represent 80% of Danish infections by early March.
Also Wednesday, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres sharply criticized the “wildly uneven and unfair” distribution of covid-19 vaccines, saying 10 countries have administered 75% of all vaccinations and demanding a global effort to get all people in every nation vaccinated as soon as possible.
The U.N. chief told a high-level meeting of the U.N. Security Council that 130 countries have not received a single dose of vaccine and declared that “at this critical moment, vaccine equity is the biggest moral test before the global community.”
Guterres called for an urgent global vaccination plan to bring together those with the power to ensure equitable vaccine distribution — scientists, vaccine producers and those who can fund the effort.
And he called on the world’s major economic powers in the Group of 20 to establish an emergency task force to establish a plan and coordinate its implementation and financing. He said the task force should have the capacity “to mobilize the pharmaceutical companies and key industry and logistics actors.”
Guterres said Friday’s meeting of the Group of Seven major industrialized nations — the United States, Germany, Japan, Britain, France, Canada and Italy — “can create the momentum to mobilize the necessary financial resources.”
Thirteen ministers addressed the virtual council meeting organized by Britain on improving access to covid-19 vaccinations, including in conflict areas.
The coronavirus has infected more than 109 million people and killed at least 2.4 million of them. As manufacturers struggle to ramp up production of vaccines, many countries complain of being left out and even rich nations are facing shortages and domestic complaints.
The World Health Organization’s Covax program, an ambitious project to buy and deliver coronavirus vaccines for the world’s poorest people, has already missed its own goal of beginning coronavirus vaccinations in poor countries at the same time that shots were rolled out in rich countries. WHO says Covax needs $5 billion in 2021.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told the council that the Biden administration “will work with our partners across the globe to expand manufacturing and distribution capacity and to increase access, including to marginalized populations.”
America’s top diplomat said the U.S. also plans to provide “significant financial support” to Covax through the GAVI vaccine alliance, and will work to strengthen other multilateral initiatives involved in the global covid-19 response.