Two doses of AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine. – Dar Yasin / AP / SIPA
The standoff between the European Union and AstraZeneca will be decided by justice. A hearing is being held this Wednesday before a Belgian court devoted to the alleged violation of the obligations of the laboratory which has not delivered the quantities of vaccines against Covid-19 promised to the Twenty-Seven.
The lawyers of the two parties must plead from 9 a.m. before a summary judge of the French-speaking court of first instance in Brussels. Another hearing will take place if necessary on Friday.
The Commission wants its doses
On April 26, the European Commission, which negotiated the orders on behalf of the member states, announced that it had taken legal action to arbitrate the dispute between it and the Anglo-Swedish laboratory. “What matters to us in this affair is to ensure that there is a rapid delivery of a sufficient number of doses to which European citizens are entitled”, the Commission had then justified.
Initially, before an urgent judge (the contract is under Belgian law), the 27 claim to receive the doses promised for the first quarter of 2021. The contract expires in mid-June, according to the Commission. . The EU believes that the laboratory will have to pay financial penalties if it does not meet this schedule.
AstraZeneca delivered in the first quarter only 30 million doses of the 120 million of the contract. For the current quarter, he plans to deliver only 70 million of the 180 million initially promised. A Commission official close to the matter admitted that AstraZeneca was only delivering an average of 10 million doses per month for the time being, well below the planned rate.
The group denies for its part having failed in its obligations. At the end of April, he denounced a “baseless” procedure. “If we look at the glass half full, we have delivered more than 400 million doses (worldwide) and saved tens of thousands of lives”, defended himself this weekend in the Financial Times the boss of AstraZeneca, the Franco-Australian Pascal Soriot.
Dispute on production sites
Behind the dispute over the slowness of deliveries, another looms over procurement priorities. The Europeans accuse the pharmaceutical giant, associated with the University of Oxford in the development of its serum, for not having used to deliver the EU its two British factories, mentioned in the contract, favoring the United Kingdom with this production. Another argument invoked by Brussels, European funds have been committed for the development of the vaccine and the strengthening of the industrial capacities of the laboratory. “There is no obligation to use (production) sites: this may be what the Commission wants, but it is not provided for in the contract”, replied Me Hakim Boularbah, AstraZeneca lawyer, at a procedural hearing on April 28. The decision of the summary judge should be rendered within a few days.