Despite moves to reserve millions of doses of multiple vaccines, Europe has been slower to roll out its mass immunization campaign than Britain or the United States, where President Biden faced resistance Monday from Republican senators to his $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief plan.
Here are some significant developments:
AstraZeneca plans to boost its manufacturing capacity in Europe and supply E.U. nations with 9 million additional vaccine doses before March, while Pfizer-BioNTech will deliver 75 million more doses in the second quarter.
The president of the bloc’s executive arm, Ursula von der Leyen, made the announcements on Twitter, calling the moves a “step forward on vaccines.” In a televised address, she said that E.U. authorities plan to inoculate 70 percent of European adults by the end of summer.
Even with the fresh supply, however, AstraZeneca’s new target of 40 million doses is just half of what the company originally aimed to provide. E.U. officials enacted over the weekend a new mechanism requiring drugmakers to seek authorization from member states before exporting vaccines abroad.
The European Commission’s senior trade official said the new system is “time-limited and targeted” and aimed at providing “greater clarity on vaccine production in the E.U.”
The vaccine shortages in Europe and elsewhere underscored the challenge of inoculating adult populations even as new, more virulent strains of the coronavirus continued to spread across the globe.
Despite vaccines, Israel’s infections rise
In Israel, where about a quarter of the population has already been partially immunized, authorities Sunday extended a five-week national lockdown for another five days, in part due to a rise in covid-19 infections attributed to a highly transmissible variant first identified in Britain.
Other factors driving infections include repeated violations of lockdown measures by Israel’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, a key constituency of…
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