Brussels And Macron Under Pressure Over Covid Vaccine Rollout Delays

Brussels And Macron Under Pressure Over Covid Vaccine Rollout Delays as the UK already vaccinates 1million

Leaders in Brussels are under intense pressure from member states over the slow start to the roll-out of the Covid-19 vaccine in Europe, compared to the UK where already 1 million people have received the injection.

Uğur Şahin, the chief executive of the German vaccine-maker, BioNTech, speaking with Der Spiegel, criticised the EU’s strategy on obtaining vaccines, saying, “The process in Europe certainly wasn’t as fast and straightforward as in other countries. Partly because the EU isn’t directly authorised, and the member states have a say. Clearly, there was this impression that we’ll get enough, and things won’t be so bad, and we have it under control”.

He also suggested that EU leaders has assumed wrongly that several vaccines would be ready at the same time, explaining, “It doesn’t look so rosy right now, a gap has emerged, because there’s a lack of other vaccines that have received approval and we have to fill this gap with our vaccine”.

In France reportedly there have only been a few hundred people vaccinated yet, and President Emmanuel Marcon is under fire from leading doctors and opposition politicians, accusing him of being unprepared for the challenges of the rollout.

There was more outrage among member states when it came to light that Germany had received more supplies of Pfizer-BioNTech doses than other countries, and health officials in Italy have threatened a formal complaint to the EU after discovering Germany had received 10 times the number of doses that Italy had on the first day of the vaccine rollout.

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