Nursing staff are waiting for the vaccine against COVID 19 from AstraZeneca at the sports center of the University of CUS Turin on March 14, 2021 in Turin, Italy.
Stefano Guidi | Getty Images News | Getty Images
LONDON – Six members of the European Union have raised concerns about the block’s distribution of Covid-19 vaccines after AstraZeneca cut its delivery targets again.
Austria, Latvia, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Croatia and Slovenia wrote to the European Commission on Saturday to complain that there are no proportionate bumps being delivered among the 27 countries in the European Union.
“If this system continued, it would continue to create and exacerbate large disparities between member states through the summer,” wrote the heads of state in a letter received from CNBC.
Initially, it was agreed that vaccines purchased by the EU would be distributed in proportion to a country’s population. However, some countries have introduced flexibility into the system so that they can opt for a more specific vaccine based on price and maintenance conditions.
The European Commission replied to the letter by saying that distribution was a “transparent process” and that it was the decision of the Member States to introduce this flexibility.
“If a Member State decides under this system not to take up its pro-rata allocation, the doses will be distributed among the other interested Member States,” said a statement by the Commission.
For example, according to media reports, Bulgaria chose to receive fewer Pfizer and BioNTech shots, the most expensive of the vaccines, and more of the one developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University. As a result, other EU countries were able to buy the surplus Pfizer and BioNTech vaccines.
The Bulgarian government was not immediately available for comment when it was contacted by CNBC on Monday.
If we hadn’t had the Commission doing this work on behalf of the European Union, the competition and the issues with which you opened this interview would have been greater.
Easter donohoe
President of the Eurogroup
Bulgaria and the other signatories are among the EU countries with the lowest number of vaccines received, according to the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control.
They fear that without changes, some EU states “could achieve herd immunity in a few weeks, while others would lag far behind,” they said in their letter.
Your complaint follows news that AstraZeneca will not meet its delivery targets in the coming months. The Swedish-British pharmaceutical company confirmed to CNBC on Monday that it will ship 30 million doses to the EU by the end of the first quarter and an additional 70 million doses in the second quarter.
These numbers are below what the bloc expected.
“Why do you get this idea now because you know that Austria is a member of the Steering Committee like the 26 other Member States and, like the others, has been informed of the previous allocations,” said a European official who did not want this due to the sensitivity of the problem be named, said CNBC on Sunday.
This comment suggests that the six countries could have dealt with the issue internally rather than writing a letter and making it public.
Pascal Donohoe, Ireland’s finance minister, told CNBC Monday that the problems “would have been bigger” had it not been for the work of the European Commission to monitor vaccine distribution.
It is expected to be discussed at the next European Summit later this month.