All EU Member States wish to continue procuring Covid-19 vaccines through joint procurement in 2022 and 2023. Most of them favour maintaining a ‘portfolio’ system of vaccines, combining messenger RNA vaccines with traditional vaccines.
These were the main conclusions put forward by the Portuguese minister, Marta Temido, at the end of the informal meeting of European health ministers on Thursday 20 May.
The meeting - which was attended by the European Commissioner for Health, Stella Kyriakides, and representatives from the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) - also provided an opportunity to review the circulation of Covid-19 variants in the EU.
The interventions of the different delegations showed a “massive prevalence” of the British variant, said the Portuguese minister, underlining that the Member States had also expressed their intention to continue to support a high level of testing and sequencing - which allow the detection of these variants.
“We need to do more to ensure that we know which variants are present and where. We are making progress on detection”, the Commissioner reacted on this point after the meeting.
“Member States are now monitoring variants more closely and genome sequencing rates have increased overall”, she added, but said that only about 10 had reached ECDC-recommended sequencing levels (see EUROPE 12713/14).
New agreement
On Thursday 20 May, the European Commission also announced that it had signed a third contract with the BioNTech/Pfizer group, for deliveries until 2023. The negotiation of this contract had already been mentioned in mid-April by the President of the Commission (see EUROPE 12698/1).
As announced at the time, the contract is for a total of 1.8 billion doses of Comirnaty vaccine: it guarantees the purchase of 900 million doses of the current vaccine and a vaccine adapted to the variants, with the possibility of reserving an additional 900 million doses.
The contract, the Commission said, requires that the vaccine be produced in the EU and that the essential components also come from the EU. “Thanks to the well-established cooperation with the companies under the current contracts and the arrangements in place, the timely delivery of doses is ensured ”, the institution also says.
However, only 26 Member States will be involved in these deliveries, as Hungary has decided not to take part in the contract. (Original version in French by Agathe Cherki)