AstraZeneca chief says not selling EU vaccine doses to other countries for profit

AstraZeneca's chief executive has said that the pharmaceutical firm wasn’t selling vaccines ordered by the European Union to other countries at profits. A delay in orders has flared the EU after a breakdown in supply. Last week, the company had said in a statement that a temporary reduction in deliveries was caused due to 'reduced manufacturing'. The supply was not directed to different nations to make additional revenues. Amid the mounting tensions over the shortfall of vaccine supply, the AstraZeneca chief had rejected the claims that the company diverted the UK's vaccine consignment to the European Union, stressing that the UK had signed for 100 m doses of AstraZeneca in early agreements and the UK "will come first" for vaccines. 

European Union, threatened to block vial shipments to the third-world countries outside the 27-nation-bloc. They said that the vaccine developer had 'societal and contractual' responsibilities. Furthermore,  Health Commissioner Stella Kyriakides told a European press conference, that AstraZeneca has been providing "insufficient explanations" about how short the volumes of supply will be. 

AstraZeneca’s CEO Pascal Soriot acknowledged the angst over sluggish vaccine rollout, saying that his team was working round the clock to fix the issue and ramp up manufacturing to meet the demands. In a statement to LENA European newspaper alliance, Soriot stated that AstraZeneca was not obstructing the vaccine supply of the EU and selling it to countries elsewhere to make profits. ‘We’re certainly not’, the boss alleged. 

AstraZeneca, last year, reached an agreement with Europe’s Inclusive Vaccines Alliance (IVA), spearheaded by Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands, to supply up to 400 million doses of the University of Oxford’s COVID-19 vaccine. IVA aimed to accelerate the supply of the vaccine and to make it available to other European countries, and the company sought to run supply chains in parallel across the world with other countries. Speaking of the commitment, Pascal Soriot said: “This agreement will ensure that hundreds of millions of Europeans have access to AstraZeneca vaccines and the European supply chain will make the vaccine available widely and rapidly.” However, simultaneously, the company entered similar agreements with the UK, US, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations and Gavi the Vaccine Alliance for 700 million doses. 

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Initial volumes 'lower'

However, with AstraZeneca not being able to meet the supply demands for the EU, Europe’s immunisation campaign suffered a hit and across several European countries, the mass inoculation campaign was hampered by a temporary shortfall in the supply chain. The company, meanwhile, took accountability stating: “Initial volumes will be lower than originally anticipated due to reduced yields at a manufacturing site within our European supply chain,” in a statement. Meanwhile, the EU Commission told the press that Astra had informed the EU’s vaccination steering board of a delivery schedule change, unable to meet the goal of at least 300 million doses and an additional 100 million which was a part of the company’s global commitments to ship more than 3 billion doses. 

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