Nursing staff await AstraZeneca’s COVID 19 vaccine at the CUS University Sports Center in Turin on March 14, 2021 in Turin, Italy.
Stefano Guidi | Getty Images News | Getty Images
LONDON – Six members of the European Union have expressed concern over the way the bloc distributes Covid-19 vaccines, after AstraZeneca cut back on its delivery targets.
Austria, Latvia, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Croatia and Slovenia wrote to the European Commission on Saturday to complain that blows are not being delivered proportionally among the 27 countries that make up the European Union.
“If this system continued, this summer it would continue to create and aggravate huge disparities between member states,” the heads of state wrote in a letter obtained by CNBC.
It was initially agreed that vaccines purchased by the EU would be distributed in proportion to the size of a country’s population. But some countries introduced flexibility into the system so they could opt for a more specific vaccine based on price and maintenance conditions.
The European Commission responded to the letter by saying that distribution is a “transparent process” and that it was the decision of member states to introduce this flexibility.
“Under this system, if a member state decides not to assume its proportionality allocation, doses are redistributed among other interested member states, “the commission said in a statement.
According to media reports, Bulgaria, for example, opted to receive fewer shots from Pfizer and BioNTech, the most expensive of the vaccines, and more from the shot developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University. As a result, other EU countries were able to buy the excess Pfizer and BioNTech vaccines.
The Bulgarian government was not immediately available for comment when CNBC contacted him on Monday.
If we had not had the commission to carry out this work on behalf of the European Union, the competition and the problems with which you opened this interview (with) would have been greater.
Donohoe pasqual
President of the Eurogroup
Bulgaria and the other signatories are among the EU countries with the lowest number of vaccines received so far, according to data from the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control.
They are concerned that, without any change, some EU nations “will be able to achieve herd immunity in a few weeks, while others will be far behind,” they said in their letter.
His complaint follows the news that AstraZeneca will not meet its delivery targets in the coming months. The Swedish-British pharmaceutical company confirmed on Monday to CNBC that it will deliver 30 million doses to the EU by the end of the first quarter and 70 million more doses during the second quarter.
These figures are below what the blog expected to receive.
“Why does it occur to them now, knowing that Austria is a member of the Management Board, like the other 26 Member States, and that it has been informed of previous allocations like the others,” said a European official, who did not wanted to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue, he told CNBC on Sunday.
This comment suggests that the six countries may have addressed the issue internally, rather than writing a letter and making it public.
Pascal Donohoe, Ireland’s finance minister, told CNBC on Monday that if it were not for the European Commission’s task of overseeing the distribution of vaccines, the problems “would have been bigger”.
It is expected to be debated at the next European Summit later this month.