EU praises Pfizer for boosting vaccine deliveries as it preps AstraZeneca lawsuit

The EU is keeping its friends close — and pushing its enemies further away.

Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo visited Pfizer’s Belgian factory Friday to brag publicly about the EU’s star vaccine producer, BioNTech/Pfizer — just as they get ready to launch legal proceedings against drugmaker AstraZeneca behind closed doors.

De Croo praised the “dependability” of BioNTech/Pfizer’s vaccine deliveries and thanked the company for ensuring their timeliness: “It really means a lot to us, but it also means a lot to the population,” he said.

The statements made clear just how much the EU wants to forget the recent past — with production hurdles, delivery delays and finger-pointing — and look to the future of vaccines. By and large, the EU is betting that the future will be mRNA vaccines, especially the ones coming from BioNTech/Pfizer.

“Included in our plans are also the questions of how reliable the partners, how much a partner has proven that he can deliver, and this is exactly what BioNTech/Pfizer has done,” von der Leyen said.

“We went through initial difficulties, and the experience of overcoming together difficulties, working hard together and sticking together … was a very good experience that builds trust,” she said. “On this trust, I think we can also build the future.”

But the EU isn’t about to forget its past with AstraZeneca. It’s gearing up for a lawsuit that now has the backing of every EU country and is even forgoing the option to buy 100 million more doses, which expired this week.

Even though von der Leyen declined to comment on the legal action Friday — saying only that “no decisions have been taken so far” — the lawsuit is looking ever more likely, possibly with a Commission decision later in the day, according to EU diplomats.

Back to the script

So far, Pfizer has delivered more than 100 million doses to the EU, and will increase its deliveries four-fold in the coming months, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said.

As part of that ramp-up, EU regulators on Friday approved an application from the company to increase production by 20 percent at the Puurs site in Belgium, von der Leyen said. Bourla said that approval will let the plant produce 100 million doses a month starting in May.

The EU’s vaccine poster child has already been rewarded with a third contract to supply 1.8 billion doses to the bloc from 2021 through 2023, to be completed in the coming days. The deal will provide Europeans with booster shots and retooled vaccines, and possibly supply doses to children if regulators eventually approve.

All of this good news allowed von der Leyen to ramp up her promotion of the EU’s vaccine strategy — a script that she has struggled to stay on since the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine was approved in December.

The Commission has taken beating after beating for months over what has often been cast as the EU’s failure to buy enough vaccines — whether it was complaints that the EU did not buy enough, AstraZeneca’s massive delivery cuts, or backlash against the bloc’s export controls.

On Friday, von der Leyen sought to flip the script.

“The EU vaccination campaign is on track,” she said. “Yes, we have had difficulties at the very beginning, delays, production bottlenecks. But we were able to counter them due to our broad vaccine portfolio and also thanks to strong and reliable suppliers like BioNTech/Pfizer.”

Thanks to increased deliveries, she added, the EU can move up its ambitious target to vaccinate 70 percent of the EU’s adult population from September to July.

Von der Leyen may have been too eager to bring the good news, claiming that with 123 million total vaccinations, the EU came in third in the world, just behind the U.S. and China in terms of total doses administered. She skipped over the fact that India has administered 132 million doses, making the EU fourth.

The Commission was not immediately available to clarify von der Leyen’s remarks.

She also called the EU the “global vaccination champion” for exporting many of the vaccines that are being sent around the world, even if the promise falls short of the Commission’s pledge in June 2020 to buy enough doses for the rest of the world.

De Croo, meanwhile, thanked von der Leyen for pushing EU countries to work together.

“There was no other way for us to do it in a collective effort,” he said. “And I’m convinced that in the long run, the collective effort will pay off much more than competitive effort that we see in some other parts of the world.”

Cornelius Hirsch contributed reporting.

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