EU Rules Out Renewing Contract with AstraZeneca in June

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“At the moment we are not going to renew orders beyond the end of the contract, scheduled for the end of June. We'll see what happens.

This is how the European Commissioner for the Internal Market, Thierry Breton, announced this Sunday the door slamming to AstraZeneca. A foreseeable outcome after past events are taken into account: repeated delays in the supply of the Anglo-Swedish laboratory , ongoing legal dispute for breach of contract, overload of uncertainty due to the possible secondary effects of its formula and lack of unanimity among the States on to whom to direct it (despite the insistent recommendation of universal use by the EMA). And finally, the evidence that Biontech-Pfizer has become the EU's leading laboratory.

So Breton, simply, verbalized it during an intervention in a program of the chain France Inter. There will be no contractual renewal. And that is a natural step. Because the European Commission already officially confirmed a month ago that it was renouncing to exercise a planned purchase option on an additional one hundred million doses. 'AstraZeneca is a very interesting vaccine. It was discovered by Oxford researchers. It's very good. Above all, it has the advantage of being able to be used in simpler logistical and temperature conditions.

But what we have to do today is to force the laboratory chaired by Pascal Soriot to comply with the supplies that it has pending. Millions of doses acquired last summer (when there was still no vaccine) and that he is already claiming in a Belgian court. AstraZeneca committed around 180 million doses for this second quarter of the year. Last March it advanced that it could only deliver 70. For the first three months, around one hundred million were expected and it only distributed 30.

Pillar of immunization

Breton, as the rest of the Community Executive has been defending, yesterday stressed that these breaches are "essentially" the cause of the slow (and highly criticized) deployment of vaccination campaigns in the European Union. Brussels has singled out AstraZeneca as the culprit from the outset. After all, it relied on its vaccine as a key pillar of European immunization because of its less logistical complexity and because it is cheaper.

But that scenario was soon blown to pieces. And took action. It opened a negotiation "in good faith" as part of an arbitration formula contained in the contract. It did not bear fruit, leading to legal action . The European Commission justified it this way: the laboratory had not offered "a strategy to rely on to guarantee in a timely manner the pending deliveries of its vaccine doses." I did not believe it.

At the same time, Ursula von der Leyen's team strengthened its collaboration with the Pfizer-BionTech company. Obtained advance supplies to fill the AstraZeneca serum gap. And, as the icing on the cake, last Saturday she herself confirmed from Porto the acquisition of 1.8 billion additional doses for the period 2021-2023. Breton did not hesitate to reinforce this Sunday that the supply problems have ended. "I am absolutely sure" the EU will end the year with the capacity to produce "more than 3 billion vaccines a year," he added.

AstraZeneca has justified its delays in complex manufacturing ; in the difficulties it had in its plants in the Netherlands and Belgium, those destined to meet the demand of the EU. But the community executive did not believe that argument. And it activated a mechanism to restrict exports at the same time that it required it to compensate that supposed "lower production" in Europe with doses manufactured in the factories that this firm has in the United Kingdom.

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