BRUSSELS (AP) – Amid signs that several infectious variants of coronavirus are spreading uncontrollably across Europe, EU governments and leaders rushed on Wednesday to speed up vaccination efforts hampered by limited supply and to fund ways to to look for variants and to counteract them.
The European Union announced on Wednesday that it has agreed to buy another 300 million doses of Modern COVID-19 vaccine and has injected nearly a quarter of a billion euros (nearly $ 300 million) into efforts to combat virus variants. .
The news came just hours after Pfizer and BioNTech said they had signed an agreement to deliver another 200 million doses of the block to the vaccine.
The EU Commission has said its second contract with Moderna envisages an additional 150 million doses in 2021 and an option to purchase another 150 million doses in 2022.
“With a portfolio of up to 2.6 billion doses, we will be able to provide vaccines not only to our citizens, but also to our neighbors and partners,” said European Commission Chief Ursula von der Leyen.
Von der Leyen and her team have been heavily criticized for managing the EU’s vaccine procurement process. While the bloc of 27 nations began vaccinating 450 million citizens almost two months ago, it lags far behind Britain, the United States and others in terms of the share of the population affected.
Von der Leyen also revealed EU plans to better detect virus variants and speed up the approval of adapted vaccines that can counteract them.
As the British virus variant appears to be becoming dominant in the EU, the executive arm has said it will spend at least € 75 million to support genomic sequencing and develop specialized testing for new variants. Another € 150 million will be allocated to research and data exchange.
“Our priority is to make sure that all Europeans have access to safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines as soon as possible,” said von der Leyen. “At the same time, new variants of the virus are emerging rapidly and we need to adapt our response even faster.”
The German Minister of Health said that the virus variant first detected in the UK last year now accounts for more than a fifth of all positive tests in his country, rising from 6% to over 22% in just two weeks.
In Slovakia, which now has the highest virus death rate per capita in the world, authorities found the UK variant in 74% of its positive samples.
The Danish Minister of Health, Magnus Heunicke, said that the British version accounted for 45% of the cases analyzed in the second week of February and predicted that it would represent 80% of Danish infections by the beginning of March.
Scientists say the British version is spreading more easily and is probably more deadly, but so far existing vaccines appear to be effective against it. However, another variant first detected in South Africa showed signs of being able to steal the immune response generated by the AstraZeneca vaccine.
Authorities in Germany’s most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia, have expressed concern that some people seem less willing to get the AstraZeneca vaccine than those made by Moderna or Pfizer.
“The AstraZeneca Authorized Vaccine is not a second-class vaccine,” the state health ministry said. The vaccine has a good efficacy and is well tolerated.
Reluctance to the AstraZeneca vaccine, which is given only to those under the age of 65 in Germany, has been bolstered by reports that some people have had a fever and headache after being shot. Officials say such reactions are normal after vaccinations, show that the body’s immune system responds and should disappear after a day or two.
Health Minister Jens Spahn said that if people did not want to get hit in AstraZeneca, he and others would gladly take it.
“If the people who are offered it do not take it, then we will give it to the next person,” he said, noting that Germany and the EU are still facing shortages of vaccines.
Pfizer and German partner BioNTech have confirmed that they have also finalized an agreement to supply the EU with another 200 million doses of vaccine.
The two companies said that these doses – expected to be administered this year, about 75 million of them in the second quarter – add to the 300 million doses of vaccine originally ordered by the block. The EU has the option of requesting another 100 million doses.
Vaccine shortages have been a paid problem in Europe.
Last month, Pfizer said it was temporarily reducing deliveries to Europe and Canada, while improving production capacity at its plant in Belgium. The EU also had a public spit with AstraZeneca to receive fewer vaccines than anticipated. The head of AstraZeneca blamed the delay on the new factories that have to solve the problems of vaccine production.
Spain’s leading coronavirus expert says that at current levels of vaccine supply, it makes no sense to set up massive facilities to administer the blows, repeating the comments of US governors, who also face a lack of vaccines in their states.
Meanwhile, the European Medicines Agency said it could issue an opinion by mid-March on a fourth vaccine, a one-shot version of Johnson & Johnson. The other three EU-approved vaccines require two shots a few weeks apart.
Von der Leyen said the EU bought more doses than needed because it wanted to provide neighboring fires to its neighbors “from the Eastern Partnership in the Western Balkans to Africa” - although some of those countries have already opted for vaccines from Russia and China after losing to richer nations in early tendering for vaccines.
Authorities in Berlin opened the fifth coronavirus vaccination center in the capital on Wednesday, located in an indoor cycling arena. The vast Velodrome started with only 120 vaccinations, but officials hope to increase this to 2,200 a day.
“We can’t complain,” said Dieter Krueger, who was waiting in the recovery room with his 60-year-old wife, Ilse, after receiving a vaccine with Moderna. “Things are getting better.”
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Jordani contributed from Berlin. Geir Moulson in Berlin, Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen and Aritz Parra in Madrid contributed to this report.
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