[ad_1]
BRUSSELS – The European Union is pushing forward emergency legislation that will give it broad powers to curb exports for the next six weeks of Covid-19 vaccines made in the bloc, a sharp escalation in its response to supply shortages in the country that created a political maelstrom in the midst of a third rising wave on the continent.
The legislation unveiled on Wednesday includes new rules that will make it more difficult for pharmaceutical companies producing Covid-19 vaccines in the European Union to export them and are likely to disrupt supplies to Britain.
The European Union has mainly been at odds with AstraZeneca since it significantly reduced its supply to the block, citing production issues in January, and the company is the main target of the new rules. But the legislation, which could block the export of millions of doses from EU ports, could also affect Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.
Britain is by far the biggest beneficiary of EU exports and will be the one to lose the most under these rules, but they could also be applied to curb exports to other countries like Canada, for example, the second largest recipient of vaccines manufactured in the EU, as well as Israel, which receives doses from the block but is very advanced in its vaccination campaign and therefore considered less needy.
“We are in the crisis of the century. And I am not ruling anything out at the moment, because we have to make sure that Europeans are vaccinated as soon as possible, ”said Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, last week in comments that paved the way at the news of the rules. “Human lives, civil liberties and also the prosperity of our economy depend on it, on the speed of vaccination, to move forward.”
The legislation is unlikely to affect the United States, which has so far received less than a million doses from EU-based facilities.
The Biden administration said it had obtained enough doses from its three licensed manufacturers – Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson – to cover all adults in the country by the end of May. Most of this supply comes from factories in the United States. The country also exports vaccine components to the European Union, which is reluctant to risk disrupting the raw material supply chain.
The European Union has allowed pharmaceutical companies to fulfill their contracts by allowing them to export more than 40 million doses of vaccine to 33 countries between February and mid-March, including 10 million in Britain and 4.3 million in Canada. The bloc has kept around 70 million at home and distributed them to its 27 member countries, but its efforts to organize mass vaccination campaigns have been delayed by a number of missteps.
Exporting liberally abroad when domestic supply is low has been a key part of the problem, and the bloc has been criticized for allowing exports in the first place, when the United States and Britain practically blocked the national production for home use through contracts with pharmaceutical companies.
The result has been a troubled vaccine rollout for the richest group of countries in the world. The impact of failures is exacerbated by a third wave that sends healthcare systems across the continent into emergency mode and ushers in painful new lockdowns.
The European Commission, which ordered the vaccines, and the individual governments of member states responsible for their national campaigns have come under severe criticism for their failures by voters tired of lockdowns and the growing number of Covid-19 cases. Public anger and its political cost have increased as the bloc has fallen behind several peers in the rich world in pushing vaccination campaigns forward, despite being home to major manufacturers.
The bloc has seen recipients of vaccines produced in its member countries, as well as in other wealthy countries, run ahead with their vaccination campaigns. Almost 60% of Israelis have received at least one dose of the vaccine, 40% of Britons and a quarter of Americans, but only 10% of EU citizens have been vaccinated, according to the latest information released by Our World in Data.
The export restrictions are imposed by the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union and are expected to come into force on Thursday.
EU officials said the rules would allow for some discretion, meaning they would not result in a blanket export ban, and officials still expected many exports to continue.
“With this mechanism, we have a certain leverage effect, so we can engage in discussions with other major vaccine producers,” Valdis Dombrovksis, the bloc’s trade czar, said at a press briefing on Wednesday. “And when we engage in these discussions, an important element is that we have to keep global supply chains functioning,” he said. He declined to say how the bloc would actually benefit from these stricter export restrictions.
Youmy Han, the spokesperson for Canadian Minister of International Trade, Mary Ng, called the measures “worrying.”
“Minister Ng’s counterparts have repeatedly assured her that these measures will not affect vaccine shipments to Canada,” Han said. Canada depends on the European Union for almost all of its vaccine supply: all Moderna and Pfizer vaccines from Canada come from Europe, although the country received a small shipment of the AstraZeneca vaccine from India.
The new rules come after months of escalating tensions between the European Union and AstraZeneca, in a situation that has become toxic to the bloc’s fragile relations with its recently departed member Britain.
The problems started in late January, when AstraZeneca told the bloc it would cut deliveries by more than half in the first quarter of 2021, upsetting vaccine deployment plans. In response, the European Union put in place an export clearance process, forcing pharmaceutical companies to apply for permission to export vaccines and giving the European Union the power to block them if they were. considered to go against the contractual obligations of a company towards the block.
Since February 1, the European Union has blocked only one export out of more than 300, a small shipment of AstraZeneca vaccines to Australia, on the grounds that the country was almost Covid-free as the bloc battled an increase in infections.
The new rules introduce more grounds for blocking exports. They encourage blocking shipments to countries that do not export vaccines to the European Union – a clause clearly aimed at Britain – or to countries that have “a higher vaccination rate” than the European Union. “Or where the current epidemiological situation is less serious” than in the block.
In recent days, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has sought to adopt a conciliatory tone in an attempt to avoid an EU export ban that would deal a heavy blow to his country’s rapid vaccination campaign.
After the new rules were announced on Wednesday, a UK government spokesperson said: “We are all fighting the same pandemic – vaccines are an international operation; they are produced by the collaboration of great scientists from around the world. And we will continue to work with our European partners to ensure the deployment of the vaccine. The spokesperson added that the British vaccination campaign was on track.
Benjamin mueller contribution to reports from London, Sharon LaFraniere from Washington and Ian austen from Ottawa.
[ad_2]
Source link