French EU minister: Europe didn’t invest enough in vaccines

PARIS – Europe didn’t invest enough in the development of COVID-19 vaccines or in expanding production capacities, according to French Junior Minister for Europe Clément Beaune.

“On the European level, what we didn’t do well is investment in the last phase of the development of the vaccines and the anticipation of production capacities,” Beaune said Thursday at a hearing before the French Senate’s Economic Affairs Commission.

EU countries have lagged behind the likes of the U.K., U.S. and Israel in their vaccination rollouts, and suffered from supply delays, at the same time as the EU has become a major exporter of vaccine.

Beaune went on to deny that the EU had botched the drawing up of its contracts with pharmaceutical companies, as has been suggested during its row with vaccine maker AstraZeneca, or that the EU had put itself at a disadvantage by seeking to negotiate lower prices for vaccine supplies than those paid by Israel, for example.

He said the EU must learn from its mistakes and better equip itself to quickly produce second generation COVID-19 vaccines at scale.

“We will undoubtedly have to unblock, on the European level, several billion euros in the coming few months for this second generation; it’s not the case yet, and it’s the battle we are waging,” Beaune said.

According to Beaune, the amount of investment needed “is probably in the order of several billion euros at a minimum,” and he said there was a need to “act fast on a European level on this, because over the long run, no country alone will be able to make such a budgetary and industrial effort.”

Beaune said the European Research Area had been allocated €150 million, but that in his view, the allocation “is not at all the proper order of magnitude.” By way of comparison, Beaune said, the U.S. federal government spent $14 billion alone on the last stage of producing the first-generation vaccine.

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