The agreement with Pfizer would be the world’s biggest single deal for a Covid-19 vaccine to date.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced the landmark purchase on Friday during a visit to a Pfizer manufacturing plant in Puurs, Belgium.
Our priority is to ensure #COVID19 vaccine deliveries take place to protect the health of 🇪🇺.
This is why @EU_Commission has decided jointly with all Member States to bring legal proceedings against #AstraZeneca.
Every vaccine dose counts. Every vaccine dose saves lives.
— Stella Kyriakides (@SKyriakidesEU) April 26, 2021
European Commission’s lawyers are pressing for immediate deliveries of doses from all of Astra Zanaeca’s factories.
The legal case is the latest in an ongoing saga between the European Union and the Anglo-Swedish company.
Both have been at loggerheads over the latter’s alleged shortfall of deliveries to the bloc.
In the meanwhile, Britain’s medicine regulator said there had been a further 41 reports of rare blood clots after doses of AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine.
However, the study says that the benefits of the shot continued to outweigh the risks for the majority of people.
While the growth of COVID-19 infections is slowing down in some European countries, others are experiencing an increase.
According to numbers by Johns Hopkins University published on Our World in Data, the UK and Spain experienced their third waves early on in the year and in short succession with the fall’s second waves. While the UK’s battle with the B.1.1.7 variant and subsequent successful vaccination campaign made for a stark improvement of the situation, Spain recently saw case numbers rise once more in what would constitute a fourth wave for the country.
France was one of the first in Europe to implement a second lockdown in late October but was more hesitant during the third wave. The country locked down for the third time in mid-March but even one month later, new case numbers show no real improvement.
Germany went through two waves without ever coming out of its second lockdown, which started November 1, but was tightened significantly on December 16.