Member State ambassadors to the EU spent another day discussing the distribution of the 10 million doses of Covid vaccine to be delivered in advance by Pfizer-BioNTech (see EUROPE 12690/1). At the end of their meeting on Thursday 1 April, it was decided that 19 Member States (but not Austria, the Czech Republic and Slovenia) would participate in the solidarity mechanism.
In mid-March, the European Commission announced that Pfizer-BioNTech was meeting all of its vaccine production and delivery commitments and would even be able to deliver 10 million doses ahead of schedule in the second quarter, originally planned for the third and fourth quarters (see EUROPE 12679/1). These additional doses were immediately coveted by countries that had bet on AstraZeneca’s vaccine and whose vaccine stocks proved to be lower than expected, given the problems encountered by the Anglo-Swedish company.
The proposal presented on 13 March to the ambassadors of the Member States to the EU (Coreper) by the Portuguese Presidency of the EU Council—which envisaged reserving one third of these doses for the countries most in need and distributing the rest in proportion to the population in the Member States—was not accepted.
In the course of the discussions, only 19 Member States were prepared to temporarily ‘give up’ some of the doses they were entitled to under the pro rata mechanism to support countries facing difficulties in vaccination, namely Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Latvia and Slovakia.
On the other hand, three Member States refuse this solidarity mechanism, namely Austria, the Czech Republic and Slovenia. While Austria’s motives are clear (with the 30% threshold, it would not have been able to get any additional doses—in this case, it will receive 199,000), the Czech Republic’s motives are less clear, as it is giving up part of the 143,000 doses it was entitled to under the original Portuguese proposal.
In the end, Austria, the Czech Republic and Slovenia will receive a proportion of doses in proportion to their population (pro rata calculated on 10 million); Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Latvia and Slovakia a little more, under the solidarity mechanism (pro rata on 10 million AND on 2.8 million); and the rest of the Member States, i.e. 19 States remaining, a little less than what they should have received with the pro rata mechanism (pro rata on 6.66 million). However, according to our information, these 19 countries should recover this surplus in the third and fourth quarters.
Link to the Presidency press release: https://bit.ly/31DVe1s (Original version in French by Sophie Petitjean)