Europe relents, approves vaccine shipment to Australia, other countries

The system raised alarm bells in Australia and other countries relying on early shipments from Europe. Australian government officials piled pressure on the EU to make sure its own rollout would not be collateral damage.

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Pfizer is due to ship at least 80,000 doses per week from Belgium to Australia this month, rising to a total of 10 million throughout the year.

Australia is also expecting 1.2 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine from Europe while manufacturing of that vaccine ramps up in Melbourne.

European Commission trade spokeswoman Miriam García Ferrer said on Wednesday night Brussels-time that 27 requests for export approvals had been granted to various countries, including Australia.

She would not say whether the approval was for Pfizer or AstraZeneca vaccine, the agreed volumes or proposed export dates.

Comment has been sought from the Morrison government.

Other shipments have been approved to New Zealand, China, Bahrain, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Kuwait, Mexico, Oman, Panama, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates.

García Ferrer said the EU had not rejected any export requests so far.

The EU has previously described the export controls as a “transparency and authorisation mechanism”. The regulation underpinning the measure states it is not the intention of the EU to “restrict exports any more than absolutely necessary”.

But the approach has prompted an outcry from a host of experts and officials who believe it represents a dangerous precedent in so-called ‘vaccine nationalism’.

It was also viewed as an attempt by the bloc to find a culprit for its trouble-plagued rollout, which is lagging well behind Britain’s.

On Thursday, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen defended the EU’s approach of trying to beat the pandemic with a unified vaccine plan for its 27 nations, even as she admitted mistakes in the strategy to quickly obtain sufficient vaccines for its 447 million citizens.

“We are still not where we want to be. We were late to authorise. We were too optimistic when it came to massive production and perhaps we were too confident that, what we ordered, would actually be delivered on time,” von der Leyen told the EU Parliament.

Von der Leyen stuck with her promise to have 70 per cent of the EU’s adult population vaccinated by the end of summer and blamed big pharmaceutical companies for not keeping vaccine production up high enough.

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“Indeed, industry has to match the groundbreaking pace of science,” she said.

“We fully understand that difficulties will arise in the mass production of vaccines. But Europe has invested billions of euros in capacities in advance, and we urged the member states to plan the vaccine rollout. So now we all need predictability.”

With AP