Covid-19: Europeans disunited in the face of vaccination
The European Union Medicines Agency gave the green light to Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine on Wednesday, January 6, 2021.
AP - Charlie Riedel
Text by: RFI Follow
3 min
The European Medicines Agency gave the green light on Wednesday January 6 for the use of the Moderna vaccine in the countries of the European Union (EU).
This vaccine from the American laboratory Moderna therefore becomes the second to receive certification for the EU after that of BioNTech and Pfizer in December.
But this authorization comes at a time when European and national strategies for vaccination are called into question in several EU countries.
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With our correspondent in Brussels
,
Pierre Bénazet
The authorization of Moderna's mRNA-1273 vaccine is
expected to give some oxygen to national health authorities in the European Union.
The pre-order signed by the Commission covers 160 million doses in addition to the 300 million doses ordered from BioNTech and Pfizer.
As two injections are needed each time, the vaccination of 230 million Europeans is now potentially guaranteed, more than half of the EU's population.
However, the criticisms do not weaken on the vaccination campaigns among the Twenty-Seven.
There are the controversies in France, Ireland and Bulgaria against the slowness of the national vaccination strategy, the criticisms of Hungary, which accuses the European Commission of slowness in the negotiation of pre-order contracts and the criticisms in Germany against the government for agreeing to hand over the negotiation of these orders to the Commission.
In this context, thirteen Scandinavian and Central or Eastern European countries formally ask the EU to extend to the countries of the Caucasus, Moldova, Ukraine and Belarus the vaccination assistance already offered to the countries of the Balkans. .
What production and supply capacity?
The European Union has therefore so far ordered 160 million doses from Moderna.
They must be delivered in full between the first and the third quarter of 2021. However, Brussels is not able to say precisely from when and at what pace.
France should eventually receive around 500,000 doses per month.
Even before the validation of Brussels, Moderna announced that it had increased its estimate of world production for 2021 from 500 to 600 million and the American biotech continues to invest and hire in the hope of being able to reach 1 billion doses this year.
On the side of Pfizer / BioNtech, the European Union recently increased its order to 300 million doses by exercising an option taken at the time of the contract.
For now, these orders from the two laboratories would allow half of the European population to be vaccinated, at the rate of two doses per person.
So Brussels is trying to negotiate additional supplies with Pfizer / BioNTech.
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