The EU SUES AstraZeneca for ‘failing to honour its contract’ after Brussels’ disastrous vaccine roll-out put it months behind US and UK
The EU is suing AstraZeneca over shortfalls in Covid vaccines which it blames for slowing the continent’s jab roll-out to a crawl.
Legal action was launched against the British-Swedish drug-maker on Friday last week, a spokesman for the EU commission said today, adding that all 27 member nations supported it.
‘Terms of the contract have not been respected and the company has not… come up with a reliable strategy to ensure timely delivery of doses,’ the spokesman said.
The contract, which was made public by the EU back in January, states that AstraZeneca will use its ‘best reasonable efforts’ to deliver 180million Covid vaccines in the first half of this year, and 300million by the year-end.
In reality less than a third of the initial 180million have turned up, leading to allegations of vaccine nationalism after it emerged that all UK orders had been filled.
AstraZeneca boss Pascal Soriot denied favoritism, saying the UK had been given its doses first because it signed a contract earlier and had a separate supply chain that was not affected by issues in Europe.
In response, the EU published most of the contract it signed with Astra – which stated that factories in the UK will be counted as part of Europe.
But a legal analyst who examined the contract for MailOnline said the term is misleading and refers to medical regulation only – not the overall supply chain.
The Netherlands, alongside a number of EU countries, has crippled its own vaccine programme with a series of stops and starts in its roll-out
Steven Barrett, a respected commercial lawyer with the Radcliffe Chambers, told MailOnline at the time that the EU’s legal position is ‘unsustainable’ while their public comments are ‘demonstrably wrong’.
Nevertheless, it appears the EU has decided to advance its argument in court in the hopes of securing more jabs for its vaccine drive – which is lagging far behind both the UK and US.
‘The Commission has started last Friday a legal action against AstraZeneca,’ the EU spokesman told a news conference today.
‘Some terms of the contract have not been respected and the company has not been in a position to come up with a reliable strategy to ensure timely delivery of doses,’ the spokesman said, explaining what triggered the move.
‘We want to make sure there is a speedy delivery of a sufficient number of doses that European citizens are entitled to and which have been promised on the basis of the contract,’ he said.