BRUSSELS — The European Union has filed a lawsuit in Belgium
against
AstraZeneca over what it says is a breach of contract in the
pharmaceutical company’s delivery of COVID-19 vaccine, the
European Commission announced Monday.
اضافة اعلان
The bloc’s relationship with the company has soured rapidly
since AstraZeneca said in January that it would not be able to deliver on its
scheduled vaccine doses for the first quarter of the year, setting the region’s
vaccination campaign back by weeks.
“The commission has started last Friday a legal action
against the company AstraZeneca on the basis of breaches of the advanced
purchase agreement,” said Stefan de Keersmaecker, a spokesman on health issues
for the commission, the EU’s executive branch.
“The reason indeed being that the
terms of the contract, or some terms of the contract, have not been respected
and the company has not been in a position to come up with a reliable strategy
to ensure the timely delivery of doses.”
De Keersmaecker said that all 27 EU member countries supported
the move.
The company, while acknowledging that production problems
have caused delays, has said its failure to deliver is not a breach of
contract, because the European Union had placed its order after other clients,
most notably Britain. A spokesman for the company did not immediately respond
to a request for comment Monday.
The two parties had been engaged in a dispute arbitration
effort, but the European Union decided to move ahead with a legal case. The
contract is under Belgian law, and legal proceedings would happen in Belgium.
The EU’s vaccine contract with AstraZeneca, a
British-Swedish company, was the first it signed, in August, and covers 400
million doses. So far, the company has delivered just over 30 million.
In an interview with The New York Times on Sunday, European
Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the company had supplied only a
quarter of what it had promised to the bloc and had to deliver 200 million
doses of vaccines by the end of this quarter.
She indicated that the European Union would not open talks
over future supply.
“At the moment, the company has a delay in delivering 200
million doses of vaccine by the end of the second quarter,” she said. “The
number speaks for itself.”
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