EU countries look abroad for vaccines as doubts in Brussels grow

The EU is short on coronavirus vaccines, but on Tuesday the European Commission faced an even shorter supply of answers to rising complaints from national capitals starting to look elsewhere for coronavirus inoculations.

In just the last few days, Denmark, Austria, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic have all joined Hungary in breaking ranks with the EU’s vaccination strategy by going beyond Europe’s borders for doses. In the process, they’ve unleashed a devastating barrage of criticism directed at the EU, saying their citizens simply can’t wait for the Commission to get its act together. 

Confronted with the assault, the Commission on Tuesday pleaded once again for understanding but offered no immediate solutions, other than to insist that it was confident in its approach.

“The production and delivery of vaccines is a project that comes with a lot of obstacles,” spokesperson Stefan De Keersmaecker said at the midday news conference. “I think we have developed a successful vaccine strategy.” 

EU national leaders, however, increasingly beg to differ. 

“Total shitshow,” German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz reportedly said of the EU vaccine program.

“The EMA is too slow,” Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz told BILD, referencing the European Medicines Agency as he described a plan to jointly develop vaccines with Denmark and Israel.

“I’m not waiting,” declared Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, explaining Budapest’s decision to buy Russia and Chinese vaccines after the leader himself got vaccinated with the Chinese Sinopharm vaccine.

And Polish President Andrzej Duda used a phone call Monday with Chinese President Xi Jinping to express interest in purchasing Chinese vaccines. 

The loud, public push by numerous capitals to pursue foreign-made vaccines amounts to a stunning rebuke of Brussels following weeks in which national leaders had refrained from criticism and pointedly reiterated their support for the Commission-led joint procurement effort. 

The unmistakable erosion of EU solidarity in recent days also suggests that national leaders had given Brussels one last chance during a European Council video summit last Thursday to provide some concrete, positive news about the EU’s own vaccination rollout that the heads of state and government could bring home to their constituents. 

Instead, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Council President Charles Michel only reiterated that there would still be many difficult weeks ahead. They noted that supplies of vaccines made in the EU would ramp up steadily throughout the spring and that a new Commission task force was looking for ways to increase manufacturing capacity, including by identifying new production sites. 

But their acknowledgement that EU citizens were rightly growing frustrated seemed rather hollow compared to the images from Slovakia on Tuesday of giant boxes of Russian-made Sputnik V vaccine being offloaded from an airplane’s cargo hold. 

The Commission on Tuesday insisted the EU’s program was on track. “These companies are now in the process of producing around 1.5 billion doses, so that’s a lot of doses and we are confident that by the summer of this year we should be in a position to reach the EU target of 70 percent for vaccinations,” De Keersmaecker said.

Pressed by reporters to answer the cascade of criticism, the Commission’s chief spokesperson, Eric Mamer, insisted that no EU country had asked to drop out of the joint procurement program, and suggested that it’s easier for a small country like Israel with around 9 million people to quickly vaccinate its population compared to the 450 million people in the EU, all in different member states with different health care systems. 

“It’s not as if you can take one model and simply stick it on the European Union and say, ‘This is what you should be doing,’” Mamer said. 

It was hardly a robust defense, reflecting the difficulty the Commission is having as it tries to reclaim the narrative amid surging discontent across the bloc.

Solidarity be damned

So far, none of these breaks are an explicit violation of the EU’s vaccination strategy. Countries were always technically allowed (although strongly discouraged) from using any vaccine not approved by the EMA and purchased with the Commission.

But the moves go beyond grumbling about von der Leyen’s vision that the entire bloc should buy the same vaccines at the same price to use at the same time. Now more EU leaders are saying: Solidarity be damned. We just need vaccines.

Some of the countries going against the EU’s strategy are the same countries who held up the process in 2020 — or are the ones that benefit from it most.

“I think that for a country like Slovakia, chances of securing or procuring a vaccine are much better in this way than if we had gone it alone,” President Zuzana Čaputová told POLITICO, voicing the gratitude from smaller countries that they weren’t left behind in the vaccine race thanks to the Commission.

Only days later, though, Slovakia bought 2 million doses of Russia’s Sputnik vaccine.

And it was Poland, now eyeing vaccines from China, that held up talks with mRNA producers, notably BioNTech/Pfizer, in the late summer because the vaccines were more expensive and used a yet-unproven technology, betting instead that Oxford/AstraZeneca was a more reliable, cheaper option. Poland didn’t even order all the doses of the Moderna vaccine that it could have. 

Denmark, on the other hand, got more mRNA vaccines from the EU than its pro-rata allocation by purchasing extra doses that other countries like Poland didn’t want. 

After defending the EU’s approach from German and Hungarian criticism, the Commission tried to give its vaccination strategy a booster shot by proposing the HERA Incubator, the first step toward creating an EU version of the U.S.’s biomedical agency BARDA, which many credit as the reason the U.S. was able to sign deals faster and produce more vaccines. 

EU leaders signed off on the Commission’s proposal for a HERA Incubator last week, allowing the EU to speed up approval of retooled versions of the authorized vaccines to combat new variants while investing more money into genomic sequencing to better identify those variants. 

Other proposals are still vague. The Commission hasn’t yet specified where there might be more production capacity or how much money it would need to sign more deals.

Another idea the Commission floated is to create an EU-wide “emergency use authorization” provision for new vaccines to speed approval. But the idea goes against the Commission’s insistence that the EMA needs time to properly review coronavirus vaccines — one of the reasons EU leaders said the wait for vaccines was worth it.

Spring is coming 

There are positive signs that the EU’s strategy will continue to deliver, albeit not in big numbers — and not until the spring.

Next week, the EU is likely to approve its fourth vaccine, from Johnson & Johnson. The one-dose shot is about to be rolled out in the U.S., but the company won’t be able to deliver until the end of March. 

And vaccine maker Novavax is in the final stages of negotiations to complete a purchasing agreement with the Commission. Yet the American company isn’t in a major rush, as it also can’t deliver doses until the second quarter.

Then there are the existing manufacturers.

BioNTech/Pfizer will be able to deliver 75 million doses to the EU ahead of schedule — but again, not until the second quarter. 

And Oxford/AstraZeneca — whose delays prompted much of the fear and anger about the EU’s vaccine pace — promises it will deliver the full 180 million doses planned in the second quarter. But EU officials remain skeptical.

The British-Swedish company might turn to the Serum Institute of India, a vaccine producer with the goal of making vaccines for the entire globe countries, to supply the EU’s Oxford/AstraZeneca doses. The site is currently being inspected by the EMA to allow doses to be used in the EU, but it’s a controversial move that could divert vaccines originally intended for low- and middle-income countries to the EU.

It would also stand in contrast to the Commission’s lofty aspirations of purchasing doses for poorer countries back in June.

The Commission has tried to communicate that things are improving, even if the process isn’t where anyone wants it to be. 

“We know that the next few weeks will continue to be difficult as far as vaccinations are concerned,” Council President Charles Michel said after the meeting of EU leaders last Thursday. 

The question is how many EU countries will break in the meantime.

Hans von der Burchard contributed reporting. 

This article is part of POLITICO’s premium policy service: Pro Health Care. From drug pricing, EMA, vaccines, pharma and more, our specialized journalists keep you on top of the topics driving the health care policy agenda. Email [email protected] for a complimentary trial.