Is the European Union guilty of vaccine nationalism?

A major row has erupted between the European Union and the pharmaceuticals giant AstraZeneca over delays to deliveries of its new coronavirus vaccine to the 27-member bloc.

The EU says AstraZeneca, which is headquartered in Cambridge, is failing to fulfil its agreement to supply a certain quantity of the vaccine in the coming weeks.

AstraZeneca says it has simply run into some temporary production problems.  

Yet the EU health commissioner, Stella Kyrikiades, complained on Monday about a lack of clarity and insufficient explanations from the company over the delays.

In a statement, she said: “All companies producing vaccines against Covid-19 in the EU will have to provide early notification whenever they want to export vaccines to third countries.”

Ms Kyrikiades says this would merely be to ensure transparency over exports. 

But this move does raise the possibility that the EU might prevent AstraZeneca and other pharmaceutical companies sending vaccines to other non-EU nations, perhaps in order to (somehow) keep the supply for itself.

Some are arguing that the EU is dabbling in dangerous “vaccine nationalism”, while others suggest Brussels is lashing out at AstraZeneca to distract attention from its own slow and shambolic vaccine programme, which has left it trailing the UK and other parts of the developed world in terms of vaccinations per capita.

But is this picture accurate? Or is the EU itself the wronged party here and acting in a reasonable way to protects its interests?

Let’s start with the facts.

The EU signed an Advance Purchase Agreement with AstraZeneca in August for the company to supply 300 million doses of the vaccine, and an option on a further 100 million jabs.

The financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed, but reports suggest the EU made an upfront payment of around 336m euros to the drugmaker, with the funding intended to enable AstraZeneca to rapidly scale up its production.

“The European Union has pre-financed the development of the vaccine and the production and wants to see the return,” Ms Kyrikiades stressed on Monday.

The EU was expecting to receive 100 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine in the first quarter of the year. 

But AstraZeneca told the EU last week that initial delivery volumes would be much lower than originally anticipated due to reduced yields at a manufacturing site in its European supply chain, believed to be a factory in Belgium run by its partner, Novasep.

Sources at AstraZeneca agreed that the EU was justified in being aggrieved at the supply shortfall.  

“They’re right to be pissed off - we’re not delivering what we said we would,” said one.

But the source said that a major reason for the shortfall was that it was intrinsically hard to create and expand complex vaccine production facilities in a short period, and that if the EU had acted sooner to order the vaccines there would have been less likelihood of these kinds of supply problems.

This brings us to another fact, which is that the EU signed a supply agreement with AstraZeneca three months later than the UK did.

In May, the UK struck an £84m agreement for the company to supply 100 million doses of vaccine.

The EU could have struck a similar deal in June (having reached an agreement with a group comprising France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands) but the drugs company claims the EU Commission got involved in the negotiations at that point and the final agreement did not happen, in the end, until August.

That’s two months fewer to set up production facilities and deal with any problems.

“There’s no margin for error,” says someone close to the company.  

“In other supply chains when we’ve seen lower yields we’ve been able to adjust things and make the deadline. With the EU supply chain there’s no [leeway]”.

Could and should the EU have acted quicker? Perhaps, though it had to act for all 27 nations of the bloc which, arguably, made the process inevitably longer and more cumbersome.

And sources in the commission argue that through operating as a bloc on vaccine procurement in this way it was avoiding vaccine nationalism – and that it’s unfair to accuse it of that practice now.

It’s also hard to be certain that the productions problems would have been avoided had the EU signed its contract in June rather than August.

And if the timing was obviously tight one might argue that AstraZeneca should not have agreed to an unrealistic delivery target (though it would hardly be the first company to overpromise and underdeliver).

Another relevant fact is that AstraZeneca is not the only drug company struggling to meet demand for vaccines.

On 15 January the US drug company Pfizer has also told the EU, and other governments that it will not meet its previous supply commitments while it increases the capacity of its plant in Belgium. Pfizer, like AstraZeneca, has also been severely criticised by some European politicians.

There have also been muddled and inaccurate reports in the German media about the effectiveness of the AstraZeneca vaccine, seemingly based on political briefings from Berlin.

This all suggests growing tension and frustration in the EU at the overall vaccine roll-out operation, which even many in the bloc accept has been too tardy given the urgency of the crisis.

Wherever blame lies for vaccine supply delays, it would surely be unwise for the EU to block vaccine exports, given it is hoping some vaccines might be diverted to the EU from AstraZeneca’s UK production facilities. The UK government would surely respond in kind to a vaccine export embargo. So would other countries who found their expected vaccine deliveries from the EU disrupted. A tit-for-tat embargo on exports would be in no country’s interests and would worsen the pandemic. 

There will be another meeting between the EU and AstraZeneca on Wednesday. The EU appears not to trust what the company is telling it about its production problems and seems to believe applying pressure to the drugmaker will yield an improvement in supply. But sources at AstraZeneca warn that’s not going to happen.  

“It’s not like we’re holding anything back," says one. "We’re not going to suddenly say to the Japanese or the Brazilians: ‘You can’t have yours’. We can’t say ‘hey presto, here’s another 20 million doses’.”

Given that seems to be what the EU does indeed expect, the danger is that this vaccine supply row could deepen before it eases.