They claim AstraZeneca left a meeting in which he had to explain the whereabouts of the vaccines sold in Europe.

However, community sources say Brussels ‘will insist’ the pharmaceutical company return to the negotiating table to explain the delay in deliveries once the vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford is approved by the European Agency. of drugs explained the manager, who asked not to be identified due to the sensitivity of the conversations.

Wednesday’s dialogue with European Commission and member states was set to be third in as many days as an EU more and more angry requires explanation of delivery delays.

Brussels threatened Monday to impose strict export controls in the coming days to COVID-19 vaccines manufactured on the block.

The EU, which has 450 million citizens and which has the economic and political weight of the world’s largest trading bloc, is far behind countries like Israel and Britain in the vaccination campaign for health workers and groups at risk, despite more than 400,000 confirmed deaths from the virus since the start of the pandemic.

Covid-19 continues to worry everyone in 2021. I have followed the progress of the global immunization plan minute by minute.

The world continues to fight Covid-19. And all countries have started the vaccination process with the aim of ending the pandemic. An action that knows no borders and which is closely followed by the World Health Organization, Johs Hopkins University, Worldmeters and the British tracker Our World in Data, which uses information from the University of Oxford .

In fact, Our World in Data is in charge of monitoring the number of people vaccinated in each country and the number of people vaccinated per million inhabitants. After processing all kinds of data, it deposits it on a map to track the level of vaccination against Covid-19 in the different countries that already apply the different approved doses.

Country by country figures

	Country	Applied dose	Dose per 100 inhabitants	Applied vaccines	Last update

Source: Our world in data

Delays in planned deliveries of AstraZeneca vaccine, which should receive the green light from the community regulator Friday, as well as setbacks in the distribution of the developed by Pfizer and BioNTech increases the pressure on EU countries.

On Monday, a senior EU official announced that the lab had proposed a new delivery schedule, considered “unacceptable”. In addition, the official added that the explanations so far offered by the firm had not been “convincing”.

For this reason, AstraZeneca representatives have been called for another meeting on Wednesday.

AstraZeneca CEO, Pascal Soriot, He had offered an interview on Tuesday in which he sought to explain the situation, but an EU official on Wednesday questioned those arguments.

According to Soriot, AstraZeneca was able to supply her vaccines to the UK because she had signed her contract three months before and that it had given the company time to resolve the failures of the British factories.

Soriot added that “anyway, we are not committed to the EU (…) It is not a contractual commitment. We said: we will do our best, but without guaranteeing that we will be successful. “

However, the EU official questioned this version and warned that Brussels will keep asking that AstraZeneca fulfills its contract.

“We rejected a lot of things in the interview (Soriot), including the idea that UK factories are reserved for deliveries to the UK. This is not true“said the senior official.

Regarding the idea of ​​”doing what they can”, he indicated that “the contract provides for the existence of additional production capacities. So that in the event of a problem in a factory in Belgium, we can resort to capacities in other factories in Europe and the UK, ”he said.

AP Y AFP

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