Western Morning News (Saturday)
EU and AstraZeneca publish vaccine contract
THE European Union and AstraZeneca agreed on Friday to make public a heavily redacted version of their coronavirus vaccine agreement, which lies at the heart of a dispute over how many shots the pharmaceutical company should be supplying the EU’s 27 nations.
The contract, agreed to last year by the European Commission and the drugmaker, allows the EU’s member countries to buy 300 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, with an option for a further 100m doses.
It is one of several contracts the EU’s executive branch has with vaccine makers to secure a total of more than two billion shots.
As part of the “advanced purchase agreement” with vaccine companies, the EU has invested 336 million euros (£297 million) to finance the production of AstraZeneca vaccines at four factories.
But the EU lashed out at the British-Swedish
drugmaker this week after it said it would not be able to deliver the 80 million doses that it hoped to provide initially and could only supply 31 million.
Brussels claimed AstraZeneca would supply even less than that, just one-quarter of the doses due between January and March, and, member countries began to complain.
The European Commission, is the EU’s executive arm, is concerned that doses meant for Europe might have been diverted from an AstraZeneca plant on the continent to the United Kingdom, where two other company sites are located. The EU also wants doses at two sites in Britain to be made available to European citizens.
AstraZeneca chief executive Pascal Soriot told Germany’s Die Welt newspaper this week that the UK government helped create the vaccine developed with Oxford University
and signed its contract three months before the EU did.
The “advanced purchasing agreement” with the EU was signed in August, before the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine had been properly tested.
The European Medicines Agency approved the vaccine yesterday (see below), although questions remain over how effective it is among people over age 65.
Much of the 41-page document made public was blacked out. Details about the price of the vaccine were redacted. Asked about details concerning the heart of the row –exactly how many doses were promised to be delivered to the EU and when – European Commission spokesman Eric Mamer said: “We cannot give you the numbers, they have been redacted from the contract.”
The contract contains references to a “Best Reasonable Effort” being made on items such as deliveries and volumes, given the uncertainty surrounding the development of the vaccine when it was drafted.
The EU argues that this is a legal term and that only a judge can decide whether the company has made a “Best Reasonable Effort”.
The Commission yesterday also introduced measures to tighten rules on the exports of shots produced in the 27 EU countries. The “vaccine export transparency mechanism” will be used until the end of March to control vaccine shipments to nonEU countries and to ensure that any exporting company based in the EU first submits its plans to national authorities. The EU insisted the measure is not an export ban.
Officials said the mechanism would not affect humanitarian deliveries and shipments to countries covered by the COVAX initiative coled by the World Health Organisation.