In response to the European commission’s announcement
that it had launched legal action against AstraZeneca for breach of contract
and delivery shortfalls, AstraZeneca said that the legal action by the EU was
without merit and pledged to defend itself strongly in court.
A company
statement said:
AstraZeneca
has fully complied with the Advance Purchase Agreement with the European
Commission and will strongly defend itself in court. We believe any litigation
is without merit and we welcome this opportunity to resolve this dispute as
soon as possible.
Under the
contract, the case will need to be resolved by Belgian courts, Reuters reports.
European
commissioner for Health and Food Safety Stella Kyriakides wrote on Twitter:
“Our priority is to ensure [Covid-19] vaccine deliveries take place to protect
the health of [the EU].
“Every vaccine dose counts.”
EU launches legal action against AstraZeneca over
vaccine delivery delays
The EU has
launched legal action against pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca for not
respecting its contract for the supply of Covid-19 vaccines and for not having
a “reliable” plan to ensure timely deliveries, the European Commission said on
Monday.
All 27 EU
member states have backed the move.
An EU
spokesman told a news conference:
The
commission has started last Friday a legal action against AstraZeneca.
Some terms
of the contract have not been respected and the company has not been in a
position to come up with a reliable strategy to ensure timely delivery of
doses.
We want to
make sure there is a speedy delivery of a sufficient number of doses that
European citizens are entitled to and which have been promised on the basis of
the contract.
This from
Reuters:
Under the
contract, [AstraZeneca] had committed to making its “best reasonable efforts”
to deliver 180 million vaccine doses to the EU in the second quarter of this
year, for a total of 300 million in the period from December to June.
But the
company said in a statement on March 12 it would aim to deliver only one-third
of that. A week after that, the EU Commission sent a legal letter to the
company in the first step of a formal procedure to resolve disputes.
EU
commission president Ursula von der Leyen tweeted about an hour ago:
Vaccination
has helped us beat many diseases. It can be the lasting way out of the
[Covid-19] pandemic. Today, at the start of European Immunization Week, we
reached 129 million vaccinations in EU.
We’ll have
enough doses to have 70% of adults vaccinated in July.
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