The contracts signed by the European Commission for the purchase by the European Union (EU) of anti-covid-19 vaccines arrived late and did not contain clauses to resolve supply failures such as those registered, concludes the European Court of Auditors (TCE) .
The ECA’s position is contained in a special report released this Monday on the acquisition of vaccines against Covid-19 by the EU, in which the court notes that “the EU created a centralized system adapted to the acquisition of vaccines , with which they managed to make up an early pipeline of candidate vaccines spanning different companies and technologies, but they started the procurement process later than the UK and the US.”
At stake are the contracts concluded by the European Commission, on behalf of the EU, for the acquisition of anti-covid-19 vaccines given the strategy created in June 2020, under which, until the end of 2021, it concluded contracts for value of 71,000 million euros, which made it possible to secure 4,600 million doses of vaccines from the manufacturers Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, AstraZeneca, Janssen, Sanofi/GSK, CureVac, Novavax and Valneva.
“After the conclusion of the contracts, the Commission supported their execution, acting as a facilitator between the Member States and the manufacturers”, however “it had little power of influence to overcome the supply difficulties”, underlines the ECA.
Specifically, “when the EU faced serious supply failures, in the first half of 2021, it became clear that most contracts did not contain specific provisions to respond to this type of interruption,” he adds.
This situation led the community executive to go to court against the British manufacturer AstraZeneca, so that the company complied with the agreement with Brussels.
In the first six months of 2021, the EU faced supply shortages, but by the end of that year almost 952 million doses of vaccine had already been delivered to member states, allowing 80% of the adult population of the EU to be vaccinated. community. the full schematic. .
In addition, “the Commission did not fully analyze the difficulties of vaccine production in terms of manufacturing and supply chain before concluding most of the contracts”, adds the ECA, regretting that, only in February 2021, the institution created a working group to support manufacturing and supply chains, whose impact “is difficult to determine” in terms of increasing productive capacity.
In the most recent contracts concluded with vaccine manufacturers, the EU negotiators were already “in a better position to guarantee the Union’s objectives with the acquisition”, the court added.
This is because “the terms of the contracts have evolved over time”, since those signed in 2021 already had “stricter provisions on fundamental issues, such as delivery times and the place of production”, compared to those signed in 2021. held the previous year, concludes the TEC.
Therefore, the court recommends that the European Commission create guidelines for recruitment processes in the context of pandemics.
Covid-19 is a respiratory disease that became a pandemic on March 11, 2020, after SARS-CoV-2, a virus detected at the end of 2019 in China, spread rapidly throughout the world.
Source: TSF
