Paris:
AstraZeneca’s CEO insisted Tuesday that the business was not promoting vaccines ordered by the European Union to other nations at a profit, soon after delayed orders sparked fury from EU leaders.
The British-Swedish drugs firm admitted final week that it would not meet its contractual delivery commitments to the EU for the reason that of “reduced yields” in its European provide chain.
That prompted European Health Commissioner Stella Kyriakides to announce that the EU plans to begin tracking vaccine shipments exported to non-member nations — a sign of developing distrust.
“The European Union wants to know exactly which doses have been produced where by AstraZeneca so far, and if or to whom they have been delivered,” she mentioned Monday.
AstraZeneca’s CEO Pascal Soriot sought to calm the predicament on Tuesday, acknowledging that European governments have been developing “aggravated or emotional” due to repeated stumbling blocks in their vaccine rollouts.
“Our team is working 24/7 to fix the very much issues of production of the vaccine itself,” he told the LENA European newspaper alliance.
He stressed: “We’re certainly not taking vaccines away from the Europeans to sell it somewhere else at the profit.”
The business, which teamed up with Oxford University to create its vaccine, has pledged not to make a profit on sales of the jab for the duration of the pandemic.
The business is working with Oxford to create a vaccine that particularly targets a more infectious South African strain of Covid-19, Soriot mentioned.
UK “had time to fix glitches”
Europe’s AstraZeneca woes came a week soon after US group Pfizer mentioned it was also cutting early delivery volumes of its vaccine made with German firm BioNTech.
Those two announcements have risked up-ending the EU’s vaccination programmes even though heaping stress on the European Commission, which took on the activity of negotiating vaccine orders on behalf of all 27 member states.
Soriot noted that not too long ago-departed EU member Britain — which mentioned Tuesday it was confident of getting all its vaccine doses — had began its rollout 3 months earlier.
“So with the UK we have had an extra three months to fix all the glitches we experienced,” he mentioned.
The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine is nonetheless awaiting regulatory approval in the EU, with a choice from the European Medicines Agency due Friday.
The firm mentioned final year that it had agreed with the European Commission to provide up to 400 million doses to the EU.
“As soon as we get an approval by EMA, in the next few days, we will be shipping at least three million doses immediately to Europe,” Soriot mentioned.
“The target is to deliver 17 million doses by February.”
Europe is on track to obtain 17 % of AstraZeneca’s international production in February “for a population that is 5 percent of the world population”, he noted.
The AstraZeneca vaccine is less expensive than that made by rivals such as Moderna and Pfizer, and is also less complicated to stock given that it does not will need to be kept at ultra-low temperatures.
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