Last checked at 
(adds context)
By Francesco Guarascio
BRUSSELS, Oct 18 (Reuters) - More than a billion COVID-19
vaccines produced in the European Union have been exported since
December 2020, making the bloc the biggest exporter of the
shots, European Commission head Ursula von der Leyen said on
Monday.
The vaccines had gone to more than 150 countries, and the EU
had exported as many doses as it had distributed to its own
citizens, von der Leyen added in a statement.
The bloc started exporting vaccines at the start of the
global roll out at a time when other major producers such as the
United States were building up their own supplies and
restricting exports.
Most EU exports have been directed to bigger economies,
including Japan, Turkey and Britain, who had contracts with
vaccine makers based in the bloc.
Sales and donations to poorer nations have so far made up a
small proportion of total exports, but the bloc was planning to
distribute at least 500 million shots to the most vulnerable
countries in coming months, von der Leyen said.
Half of these doses would be supplied from a new contract
that the EU wants to have with a producer of messenger RNA
vaccines, officials said. The other half will be donations from
EU states who have already bought vaccines.
The bloc has already signed supply contracts with mRNA
vaccine makers Pfizer-BioNTech for a total of
up to 2.4 billion doses until 2023 and with Moderna for
up to 460 million doses.
The EU set up a vaccine export control mechanism in late
January to monitor the outbound flow of shots from the
continent.
Although the mechanism allows the EU to block exports in the
event of insufficient domestic supplies, it has been activated
only once to prevent the shipment of 250,000 AstraZeneca
vaccines to Australia in March at the height of a dispute with
the Anglo-Swedish firm about its supplies to the EU.
(Reporting by Francesco Guarascio @fraguarascio, editing by
Marine Strauss, Ed Osmond and Andrew Heavens)
