EU materially slower vax roll out than anticipated 202123 Jan 2021 06:51
This is awful sh** news for non UK residents like me but obviously is good for my SYN shares. See below FT news;
EU hit by delay to Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine delivery
Pharmaceutical group says initial volumes will ‘be lower than originally anticipated’
Michael Peel, Sam Fleming, Mehreen Khan and Donato Paolo Mancini 4 HOURS AGO
AstraZeneca has warned EU countries to expect significant shortfalls to early deliveries of its coronavirus vaccine, in a fresh blow to the rollout of the bloc’s immunisation programme, European officials have said.
The EU was expecting 100m doses of the jab in the first quarter of the year. But people with knowledge of the discussions said the company may fail to deliver even half that amount, although they stressed that final figures had not been established.
AstraZeneca insisted there was no “scheduled delay” to the start of shipments of its vaccines, but said “initial volumes” would “be lower than originally anticipated due to reduced yields at a manufacturing site within our European supply chain”.
“We will be supplying tens of millions of doses in February and March to the EU, as we continue to ramp up production volumes,” the company said, adding that the change in expected volumes did not affect the UK.
Details of the revised first-quarter deliveries to the EU were still being worked out but they could be less than 40m, several European officials said. Part of the reason for the uncertainty is that the provisional timetables are dependent on when the vaccine receives regulatory approval, which could happen next week.
It was “not looking good in the short term” for AstraZeneca jab supplies, one European official said. A second described the proposed shortfall as “significant” while another branded it a “disgrace”, reflecting the growing frustration in Europe over problems with the Covid-19 immunisation programme.
Stella Kyriakides, the EU’s health commissioner, tweeted that AstraZeneca representatives had announced the delays in a steering committee meeting with the European Commission and member states on the bloc’s vaccine strategy.
“@EU_Commission and Member States expressed deep dissatisfaction with this. We insisted on a precise delivery schedule on the basis of which Member States should be planning their vaccination programs, subject to the granting of a contitional marketing authorisation,” she wrote.
And Norway, which is not in the EU, said late on Friday evening that it would receive fewer than 200,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine in February, well below the 1.12m it had been expecting.
Camilla Stoltenberg, head of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, said to receive less than 18 per cent of the promised doses was a “disappointment” and showed that vaccine deliveries were "extremely uncertain".
The news of delays is particularly problematic for EU countries because they have placed a big bet on the AstraZeneca jab and are gearing up for what they hope
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