EU SET to receive 9 million more doses of vaccine.
BERLIN — Pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca has agreed to supply 9 million additional doses of its coronavirus vaccine to the European Union during the first quarter, the bloc’s executive arm said Sunday.
The new target of 40 million doses by the end of March is still only half what the British-Swedish company had originally aimed for before it announced a shortfall due to production problems, triggering a spat between AstraZeneca and the EU last week.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said after a call with seven vaccine makers Sunday that AstraZeneca will also begin deliveries one week sooner than scheduled and expand its manufacturing capacity in Europe.
“Step forward on vaccines,” tweeted Von der Leyen, who has come under intense pressure over the European Commission’s handling of the vaccine orders in recent days.
The EU is far behind Britain and the United States in getting its population of 450 million vaccinated against the virus. The slow rollout has been blamed on a range of national problems as well as slower authorization of the vaccines and an initial shortage of supply.
AstraZeneca’s announcement last week that it would initially supply only 31 million doses to the EU’s 27 member states due to production problems set off a fierce dispute between the two sides, with officials in Brussels saying they feared the company was treating the bloc unfairly compared to other customers, such as the United Kingdom.
On Friday, hours after regulators authorized the vaccine for use across the EU, the commission said it was tightening rules on exports of coronavirus vaccines, sparking an angry response from Britain. The commission has since made clear the new measure will not limit vaccine shipments produced in the 27-nation bloc to Northern Ireland, a U.K. territory that was guaranteed unhindered cross-border access to the Republic of Ireland under the post-Brexit deal between Britain and the EU.
EU member states praised the bloc’s executive branch last year for signing numerous deals with vaccine makers, saying the joint purchase using the combined market weight of the entire bloc had ensured a fair distribution for all 27 countries at good prices.
Since then the mood among many EU citizens toward Brussels has soured, as countries outside the bloc speed ahead in the race to vaccinate their populations.
The British government hasn’t been shy about promoting its relative vaccine success, which has helped distract from the fact that the country remains top of the table for deaths in Europe.
Official figures show 598,389 shots were administered across the U.K. on Saturday, more than six times the number that Germany managed Friday, the last day for which figures were available.
Germany has so far given at least one dose to 2.2% of its population. Britain has done the same for 13.2% of its citizens.
In response, Chancellor Angela Merkel has summoned state governors today to discuss what German media are describing as a “vaccination debacle. “
Von der Leyen, who was Germany’s defense minister before taking the post in Brussels, insisted the EU had “made good progress.”
“Of course we’ve currently got a difficult phase,” she told German public broadcaster ZDF, but added that in the second quarter more vaccine would become available as regulators approve additional formulas and further production capacity goes online.
Pfizer, which developed the first widely tested and approved coronavirus vaccine together with German firm BioNTech, has said it expects to increase global production this year from 1.3 million doses to 2 billion doses. Tens of millions of those will likely go to the EU.
In a statement, the European Commission said it plans to set up an specialized body to improve the bloc’s response to health emergency and “deliver a more structured approach to pandemic preparedness.”
As part of the effort, together with industry, the EU said it will “fund design and development of vaccines and scale up manufacturing in the short and medium term, and also to target the variants of covid-19.”
WUHAN MARKET VISIT
Meanwhile, a World Health Organization team looking into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic on Sunday visited the food market in the Chinese city of Wuhan that was linked to many early infections.
The team members visited the Huanan Seafood Market for about an hour in the afternoon, and one of them flashed a thumbs up sign when reporters asked how the trip was going.
The market was the site of a December 2019 outbreak of the virus. Scientists initially suspected the virus came from wild animals sold in the market. The market has since been largely ruled out, but it could provide hints to how the virus spread so widely.
“Very important site visits today — a wholesale market first & Huanan Seafood Market just now,” Peter Daszak, a zoologist with the U.S. group EcoHealth Alliance and a member of the WHO team, said in a tweet. “Very informative & critical for our joint teams to understand the epidemiology of COVID as it started to spread at the end of 2019.”
Earlier in the day, the team members were also seen walking through sections of the Baishazhou market — one of the largest wet markets in Wuhan — surrounded by a large entourage of Chinese officials and representatives. The market was the food distribution center for Wuhan during the city’s 76-day lockdown last year.
The members, with expertise in veterinary medicine, virology, food safety and epidemiology, have so far visited two hospitals at the center of the early outbreak — Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital and the Hubei Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine Hospital.
On Saturday, they also visited a museum exhibition dedicated to the early history of covid-19.
ISRAEL FUNERALS
Separately, thousands of ultra-Orthodox Israelis thronged a pair of funerals for two prominent rabbis in Jerusalem on Sunday, flouting the country’s ban on large public gatherings during the pandemic.
The initial funeral procession, for Rabbi Meshulam Soloveitchik, who died at age 99, wended its way through the streets of Jerusalem in the latest display of ultra-Orthodox Israelis’ refusal to honor coronavirus restrictions.
The phenomenon has undermined the country’s aggressive vaccination campaign to bring a raging outbreak under control and threatened to hurt Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in March elections. Two challengers accused Netanyahu of failing to enforce the law due to political pressure from his ultra-Orthodox political allies.
Israeli media said Soloveitchik, a leading religious scholar who headed a number of well-known seminaries, had recently suffered from covid-19.
Later Sunday, thousands of ultra-Orthodox mourners attended the funeral of another respected rabbi, Yitzhok Scheiner, once again flouting the lockdown rules. Scheiner, 98, also died from covid-19, reports said.
Alon Halfon, a Jerusalem police official, told Channel 13 TV that police had little choice but to allow the procession for Soloveitchik to proceed. He said police action had helped reduce the crowd size and that some 100 tickets were issued for health violations. But in such a densely packed environment, with children among the crowd, attempting to disperse the crowd would have been “unwise and dangerous.”
Israel’s Health Ministry has recorded over 640,000 confirmed cases of the coronavirus and at least 4,745 deaths since the start of the pandemic.
A disproportionate number of Israel’s coronavirus cases are within the country’s ultra-Orthodox minority. The strictly religious community, which makes up around 11% of Israel’s 9.2 million people, has been accounting for about 40% of the new cases.
Many ultra-Orthodox sects have kept schools, seminaries and synagogues open, and held mass weddings and funerals in violation of lockdown restrictions that have closed schools and many businesses in other parts of the country. Recent weeks have seen violent clashes between members of the ultra-Orthodox community flouting the rules and police officers trying to enforce them.