The EU is suing AstraZeneca over its ‘complete failure’ to meet delivery deadlines and contractual agreements for its vaccine.
Brussels also bitterly decided not to take up the option to buy 100 million more of the Anglo-Swedish firm’s vaccine.
The EU claimed the deadline to exercise that clause in its current supply contract with the Anglo-Swedish firm had already expired and it didn’t plan to pursue it.
Instead, diplomats have now decided to take legal action against AstraZeneca for its failure to deliver doses following a meeting on Wednesday, Ireland’s Health Minister Stephen Donnelly said on Thursday.
‘With regard to AstraZeneca, a legal case has been initiated by the (European) Commission and earlier this week I have joined Ireland as one of the parties to that legal case, specifically around AstraZeneca’s complete failure to meet its delivery and contractual agreements for April, May and June,’ he told Parliament.
The EU is seeking to save face in the courts after crippling its own vaccine roll-out by launching a war against Britain – and the rest of the world – first, by suggesting that the vaccines were ineffective, and then embargoing exports.
Only a third of Germans now consider the AstraZeneca vaccine to be safe, while just 23 per cent of the French would take it.
In Italy and Spain, most people had previously believed the jab was safe, with 54 per cent and 59 per cent backing it respectively.
But since the row over safety, those figures have fallen to 36 per cent of Italians and 38 per cent of Spaniards, YouGov figures show.
As a result, just 19 per cent of EU citizens have received their first dose of a jab, while 49 per cent of the British population has had a vaccine.
The EU launched a vaccine war in January when it was notified by AstraZeneca to expect a shortfall in doses as Britain raced ahead with inoculations.
Leaders like Emmanuel Macron lashed out at the UK, saying that the jab developed by Oxford University was only ‘quasi-effective’ – a claim later shown to be baseless scaremongering by the EU’s own medicines regulator.
The bloc meanwhile lurched to a policy of embargoing exports, condemned as ‘stupid’ even by Jean Claude Juncker, to force AstraZeneca into delivering supplies.
By the end of the first quarter, AstraZeneca had supplied 30 million doses to the Bloc, instead of the 100 million it had pledged to deliver in its contract.
The EU blamed the manufacturer, but the reason why Britain and the United States have had such successful vaccine roll-outs compared to the EU is because they were able to actually secure the doses by cutting red tape.
Brussels, on the other hand, signed contracts with AstraZeneca much later due to its vast bureaucratic red tape.
They were also more reliant on receiving doses from Pfizer and Moderna, which were hit with early production woes.
The Commission has ordered 300 million doses from AstraZeneca as part of a contract that included 400 million doses, of which 100 million was optional.
