EU nations have been specifically stung by the United Kingdom, which has received some ten million doses from EU plants while they say nothing came back from Britain. The European Union moved Wednesday toward stricter export controls for coronavirus vaccines, seeking to make sure its 27 nations have more COVID-19 shots to boost the bloc’s flagging vaccine campaign amid a surge in new infectionsThe European Union moved Wednesday toward stricter export controls for coronavirus vaccines, seeking to make sure its 27 nations have more COVID-19 shots to boost the bloc’s flagging vaccine campaign amid a surge in new infections.
The EU’s executive Commission said on the eve of a summit of the EU’s leaders that it has a plan to guarantee that more vaccines produced in the bloc are available for its 450 million citizens even if that comes at the cost of helping nations outside the bloc, most notably Britain.
EU officials said trade with the United States should not be affected and assured nations that sought to have an open, transparent relationship with the bloc that they had little to fear. The EU move is expected to be a blow to Britain, whose speedy vaccination rollout has been eyed with envy by many EU nations, especially since it came as the U.K. formally completed its Brexit divorce from the bloc. The latest figures show that 45% of Britons have had at least one vaccine shot, compared to less than 14% for the bloc.
EU Commission Vice-President Valdis Dombrovskis.said, “Some 10 million doses have been exported from the EU to the U.K. and zero doses have been exported from U.K. to the EU.So it’s clear that we also need to look at those aspects of reciprocity and proportionality,” .
In the post-Brexit era, both sides have been fighting over everything from diplomatic representation to border controls and red tape, but they did not want to take the same confrontational tone over live-saving vaccines, especially when the World Health Organization is raising alarms over rising new infections across Europe.Only hours after the Commission move, both the EU and the U.K. said in a joint statement that “we are all facing the same pandemic and the third wave makes co-operation between the EU and the U.K. even more important.”
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said global co-operation over vaccines has been the EU standard. The bloc has approved sending 41 million vaccine doses to 33 countries in the last seven weeks and believes that it stands at the forefront of international vaccine-sharing efforts. The overall total of exported vaccines is bigger still since many more were not covered by the recent export regime.
Canada also gets vaccines shipped from Europe and has received assurances “that these measures will not affect vaccine shipments to Canada,” a Canadian government spokesperson said.The EU has been feuding with AstraZeneca for months over exactly how many vaccine doses would be delivered by certain dates. Several vaccine producers, including Pfizer-BioNTech and AstraZeneca, were hit by technical production delays over the winter, just as worldwide demands for coronavirus vaccines soared. AstraZeneca has been producing less than half the doses the EU was counting on.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has sought to ease the tensions over vaccines, speaking by phone in the past few days to European leaders including von der Leyen and French President Emmanuel Macron.“The partnership we have with our European colleagues is very, very important and we continue to work with them,” Johnson told lawmakers on Wednesday
Source-The Associated Press