■ The EU struck deals for more COVID vaccine doses amid the spread of virus variants.
Bloc to spend on efforts to boost tracking of virus 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 pay for ways to hunt down variants and counter them.
The European Union announced Wednesday that it has agreed to buy another 300 million doses of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine and was injecting almost almost $300 million into efforts to combat virus variants.
The news came 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 buy 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 criticism for their handling of the EU’S vaccine procurement. The 27-nation bloc began vaccinating its 450 million citizens almost two months ago, but it still lags 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 $90.2 million to support genomic sequencing and develop specialized tests for new variants. Another $180.6 million will be allocated to research and data exchange.
Germany’s health minister said the virus variant first detected in Britain last year accounts for more than a fifth of all positive tests in his country, rising from 6 percent to more than 22 percent in two weeks.
In Slovakia, which has the highest rate of virus deaths per population in the world, authorities found the U.K. variant in 74 percent of its positive samples.
Danish Health Minister Magnus Heunicke said the U.K. variant represented 45 percent of its analyzed cases in the second week of February and predicted it will represent 80 percent of Danish infections by early March. In other developments:
■ Canada’s largest city is asking the province of Ontario to extend a lockdown order for at least two more weeks instead of having it expired as planned on Monday. Dr. Eileen de Villa, Toronto’s Medical Officer of Health, said she has never been as worried about the future as she is now because of coronavirus variants.
■ Spain will place those arriving from Brazil and South Africa in quarantine for 10 days in a new bid to stem the propagation of coronavirus variants from those countries.
■ Hong Kong is reducing social distancing rules following a sharp drop in new coronavirus cases, including restarting indoor dining and reopening gyms. The relaxation that took effect Thursday is a huge relief for the city’s service sector, which has been hammered by periodical closure orders and strict limits on dining out.
■ South Korea’s daily increase in coronavirus infections has exceeded 600 for the second straight day, continuing an upward trend following last week’s Lunar New Year’s holidays. The 621 new cases reported Thursday brought the national caseload to 85,567, including 1,544 deaths.
■ Rio de Janeiro halted new vaccinations against COVID-19 for a week starting Wednesday due to a shortage of doses, one of a growing number of Brazilian cities that have run low on supplies and are demanding help from Brazil’s federal government.