AstraZeneca woes fuel EU leaders’ worry over timely vaccine supply and putting an end to lockdowns

Five European leaders yesterday co-signed an open letter to the chairman of this evening’s summit, the former Belgian premier, Charles Michel, urging more support for intensified Covid-19 vaccine production in Europe.

This echoes calls by people like former EU trade commissioner, Phil Hogan, for “re-shoring” of vital manufacturing for strategic reasons in the wake of the past year’s pandemic.

The five leaders’ letter puts the spotlight on how the initial vaccine roll-out has been hampered by delivery shortages and delays.

In the letter to Mr Michel, the prime ministers of Spain, Belgium, Denmark, Lithuania and Poland have combined in a most unusual alliance.

They argue Europe’s “timely access” to sufficient Covid-19 jabs “remains an unsolved challenge” – a polite way of saying supplies are unreliable at best.

“In spite of the unprecedented speedy development of new high-quality vaccines, production difficulties are ongoing and lead to major delays,” the leaders’ open letter states.

“We need to provide the right support to Europe-based producers in case unexpected problems emerge during the production process.”

Doubts persist in Brussels after a furious row between the EU and the Anglo-Swedish firm AstraZeneca late last month, which in turn led to a brief but savage error by the Brussels Commission in triggering emergency provisions impacting Northern Ireland’s special trade status.

That short-lived move was a ham-fisted effort by President Ursula von der Leyen’s Commission to seal the Irish border to prevent EU-made AstraZeneca vaccines going to the UK.

This rolling vicious EU-AstraZeneca row was not helped by a news agency report on Tuesday night which cited an EU official as saying the vaccine manufacturer had revealed it would only deliver 50pc of promised supplies in the second quarter of this year, spanning April-June.

Yesterday AstraZeneca said they would be keeping to their delivery schedule with 90 million vaccine doses in the first three months of this year, and 180 million in the second quarter. That was good news but nerves still remained frayed.

In total the EU has signed pre-orders for 106 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines in the first quarter of the year.

But so far it has received less than half of that amid order shortfalls from companies like AstraZeneca, which produces one of the three EU-approved jabs, alongside Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.

Germany’s health minister, Jens Spahn, yesterday spoke of shortfalls in supplies saying the country was set to see more than 50pc less than its anticipated delivery of AstraZeneca vaccines in the second quarter, down from 34 million to 16 million.

The bigger EU states like Germany, which already have considerable pharmaceutical manufacturing power, face internal unrest at tough lockdowns, and a feeling that they could have fared better by managing the vaccine supplies nationally rather than ceding this role to Brussels.

Unlike the United Kingdom or Israel, which have made much more progress in their vaccination campaigns, the EU has chosen for a collective approach to procurement and distribution, which critics blame for the slow pace of the roll-out.

The status of AstraZeneca, which authorities in Germany, Austria and France, will not use for over 65s due to lack of data for that age cohort, does not help matters. Yesterday German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, stressed the vaccine was quite safe and ruled out people being able to choose which vaccine they wanted at this stage.

The EU and the World Health Organisation have cleared the vaccine for use by all age-groups. The vaccine remains more user-friendly than the more widespread Pfizer-BioNTech, which is harder to transport and store.

Two months after its first vaccine shots, the European Union is still struggling to get its Covid-19 inoculation drive up to speed. This evening’s EU leaders’ meeting is an effort to jump-start the process, amid fears that new virus variants might spread faster than Europe’s response.