EU procures further 300 million doses of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine

The European Union on Friday secured a deal for an extra 300 million doses of the Covid-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech in an try to allow member nations to ramp up their vaccination programmes. President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen stated the transfer was a “very positive development.”“We right now have access to 300 million doses of the BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine. We now have agreed with BioNTech-Pfizer to extend the contract. With the new agreement, we could purchase a total of up to an additional 300 million doses of the vaccine. In other words, this will allow us to double the number of doses,” Von der Leyen stated.Moreover, 75 million of those new doses can be accessible by the second quarter of the yr and the remaining doses can be delivered within the third and fourth quarters, she added. Von der Leyen additionally stated that the vaccine has already been permitted by Europe’s regulator, the European Medicines Agency (EMA), and would subsequently require no new negotiations for the deal. Also, the vaccine has been authorised already thus making it simpler for the member states to proceed their inoculation program, she added.On Wednesday, Europe granted its approval to Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine, the second in European Union. “With these two authorised vaccines, we have already secured a number of doses that we need to vaccinate 380 million Europeans. This is more than 80 per cent of the European population,” von der Leyen added. She additionally expressed the idea that different vaccines would even be permitted within the “coming weeks and months.”When requested if particular person member nations of the EU can be allowed to barter their very own offers with vaccine producers, von der Leyen stated “There will be no parallel negotiations; no parallel contracts. The framework we are all working in is a framework of 27 [nations]. Together we are negotiating, together we are procuring.”Earlier on Monday, Germany stated that the nation has signed a memorandum of understanding with BioNTech for supplying 30 million doses of their vaccine on a bilateral foundation. The nation additionally stated that the EU was conscious of the MoU, in response to a information report by Reuters.