A planned meeting between EU officials and officials from the British laboratory AstraZeneca to discuss delays in the production of covid-19 vaccines caused enormous confusion on Wednesday.
An EU official told AFP that representatives of the pharmaceutical company “withdrew” from the meeting, information later confirmed by a spokeswoman for the European Commission.
The lab and the EU are embroiled in a heated controversy following last Friday’s announcement by AstraZeneca of delays in dosing requested by the EU, which was scheduled to approve the vaccine this week.
Shortly after the information was published in Brussels, an AstraZeneca spokeswoman denied it.
“We can confirm that we have not withdrawn, we will attend the meeting with EU officials today,” he told AFP.
At a time when dissatisfaction is growing in several bloc countries due to delays in vaccine delivery, the EU is pressuring AstraZeneca to comply with a pre-purchase contract signed in August for the delivery of up to 400 million doses of vaccine, developed together with the University of Oxford.
On Monday, an EU official announced that the laboratory had proposed a new delivery program, considered “unacceptable”. In addition, he added that the explanations offered so far by the company were not “convincing”.
For this reason, a meeting with AstraZeneca representatives was convened on Wednesday.
AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot said on Tuesday that AstraZeneca had been able to supply its vaccines in the UK because it signed its contract three months earlier and this gave the company time to remedy the failures at British factories.
Soriot added that “we have not committed ourselves to the EU anyway … It is not a contractual commitment. I said: we will do everything we can, but without guaranteeing that we will achieve it.
The EU has so far authorized the use of two vaccines: Pzifer / BioNTech and Moderna.
Last week, the bloc announced that it aims to vaccinate 70% of adults in the 27 member states by the end of August, a plan that, due to delays in vaccine deliveries, remains a tightrope.