EU hails deals to get more vaccine shots, tackle variants

BRUSSELS — Amid 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 a quarter of a billion euros 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 at least 75 million euros to support genomic sequencing and develop specialized tests for new variants. Another 150 million euros will be allocated to research and data exchange.