EU orders additional COVID-19 vaccine doses

Under the new deal, the Commission has the option to request supply of an additional 100 million doses. This new agreement is in addition to the 300 million doses that have already been committed to the EU through 2021 under the first supply agreement signed last year. The additional 200 million doses are expected to be delivered in 2021, with an estimated 75 million doses to be supplied in the second quarter.

The total number of doses to be delivered to the EU member states by the end of 2021 is now 500 million, with the potential to increase to 600 million based on the option granted in the new agreement.

In addition, Moderna Inc announced that the Commission has purchased an additional 150 million doses of the U.S. company’s COVID-19 vaccine, mRNA 1273. These additional doses are expected to be delivered in Q3 and Q4 2021. With the 160 million doses already ordered last year, the European Commission has now ordered a total of 310 million doses of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine to date.

Both EC orders would be sufficient to vaccinate every EU citizen.

According to experts of the WHO’s ACT Accelerator (ACT-A), it is essential to supply COVID-19 vaccines globally at the same time to the 20 per cent of people in every nation, who are at high risk to develop severe COVID-19 disease. Otherwise, there would be a high probability that the virus can adapt itsself by new mutations in non-vaccinated people and later re-infect vaccinated persons. ACT-A was created in April 2020 by G-20 state heads to provide fair access to COVID-19 vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics to globally fight the COVID-19 pandemic. South Africa’s president Cyril Ramaphosa, whose country suffers from the B.1.351 mutation, recently put it "we are not safe if some countries are vaccinating their people and other countries are not vaccinating".

This Friday, on the invitation of UK head Boris Johnson, G-7 leaders are expected to make significant financial and political commitments to the ACT Accelerator. German Chancellor Angela Merkel is expected to contribute with further €1.5bn boosting Germany’s contribution to over €2bn, and US President Joe Biden is said to contribute US$4bn to the ACT-A. The new US presidency of Joe Biden offers the opportunity to end vaccine nationalism, which was initiated by the former US President and triggered national/blockwise vaccine orders in Europe, and partly hindered more collaborative efforts in addressing the pandemic.

Most recently, Dr Steve Arlington, President of the Pistoia Alliance of Big Pharma companies underlined that collaboration – if scientific or political – is crucial to fight the coronavirus off. "A global pandemic isn’t over as long as we have no global solutions,” he said.