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Vaccine: how Europe is organizing to keep a maximum of doses on the continent

2021-01-29T22:31:32.809Z


Against the backdrop of controversy over delivery delays, the European Union adopted an export control system on Friday


The delays announced by the pharmaceutical industries are starting to create a situation of tension between the manufacturers and the States of the Old Continent, behind in their vaccination campaign.

Targeted or even mocked for this delay, Brussels wanted to react.

So, this Friday, the European Union announced, through its European Commissioner for Trade, Valdis Dombrovskis, wanting to better control the destinations of the doses of vaccine against Covid-19 that leave the factories in its territory.

How does it work ?

To do so, as of this Saturday, safeguards for the export of anti-Covid vaccines are in place.

Concretely, this means that “export authorizations” will have to be issued by the States concerned.

The aim is "to have accurate information on vaccine production and (know) where companies want to send them," said Dombrovskis, also vice-president of the European Commission.

This is to prevent laboratories from exporting doses elsewhere that they would be contractually bound to deliver to EU countries.

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In order not to slow down vaccination, member states will have to decide "within a few hours", according to a European official.

Exceptions are made for humanitarian shipments.

In addition, this new regulation provides for "obtaining information on exports, their destinations and volume".

And this retroactively over the last three months.

"This will shed light on the movements of the last few weeks," said the Vice-President of the European Commission.

Why come to this?

The delivery delays successively announced by Pfizer and AstraZeneca are “intriguing” for some European officials.

Because if Europe starts to want to control its vaccine doses, it is because it is not convinced by the arguments of AstraZeneca, which announced drastically reducing its deliveries of vaccines to the Twenty-Seven due to a “yield” problem on a European production site.

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Blamed for its announced delivery delays, the AstraZeneca group, whose EU approved the vaccine on Friday, had announced that it could deliver "only a quarter" of the doses initially promised to the EU in the first quarter.

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Brussels recalled that the signed contract assumed production in four factories, and therefore that difficulties on the only Belgian site incriminated could not explain the extent of the delays.

What fuel the suspicion of shipments outside the EU.

The EU deemed these explanations "unsatisfactory" and requested an inspection of a Belgian factory in the group, where "certain documents and data" were seized on Thursday.

How is this measure received?

“We are not defending ourselves against a particular country, we are not in a race with anyone,” insisted Health Commissioner Stella Kyriakides, refusing to give any indications on possible routes from the EU to the UK.

Despite this declaration, it is indeed the links between the United Kingdom and the British laboratory which are, without naming them, in the sights of Europe.

This Friday evening, the British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, expressed to Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, his "serious concerns" about these restrictions on the deliveries of coronavirus vaccines, which could compromise the agreements made as part of the Brexit on Northern Ireland.

The French Secretary of State for European Affairs, Clément Beaune, warned that "Europeans could not be penalized for the benefit of another country".

"There cannot be on the one hand a significant delay in deliveries to Europe and on the other hand deliveries which are maintained or accelerated to another country", he insisted, without specify in particular whether it was aimed at the United Kingdom.

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Anti-covid vaccine: the standoff is hardening between AstraZeneca and the European Union


At the end of the day, the World Health Organization (WHO) condemned the initiative, seeing it as "a very alarming trend".

"It is always a matter of concern to see [...] restricting the export of what can be considered a global public good," Mariângela Simão, deputy director general of the organization, told reporters. responsible for access to medicines.

“This is particularly worrying because the production chains are diverse and fragmented”, with components “coming from all over the world”.

European controls can "undermine global efforts to ensure equitable access to vaccines," she regretted.

Source: leparis

All life articles on 2021-01-29

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