EU member states relinquished COVID vaccines last year, says Macron

Europe: France, Germany and Denmark are among EU countries to have boosted their vaccine plants because other parts of the bloc turned down jabs allocated to them based on population, it has emerged. Emmanuel Macron told reporters during the European Council summit that some countries did not take their full allotment of Pfizer and other coronavirus vaccines when the EU negotiated contracts.

Yet, almost all of those countries are also relinquished or "under ordered" some vaccine doses "are coming back saying we will also like to recover them," Macron explained, against the background of a report from AFP that the Czech Republic was expecting a donation of 100,000 vaccine doses from France by mid-March.

"If you look at the strict rules, we have a little more doses than [what was set aside for] our population," Macron told.

Macron called on the European Commission would also to develop mechanisms to redistribute vaccines if necessary, stating that France would "meet its responsibilities" and "stand in solidarity" with neighbors who needed extra doses.

It has also reached out to the French health ministry for confirmation that the country planned to donate doses to the Czech Republic but had not heard back at the time of publication.

As EU contracts were originally being negotiated last year, some member states were less concerned about the messenger RNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna that are comparatively more difficult to store and manage logistically, he added.

Although no member state has ever opted out of a vaccine contract, "some member states may be interested in less of a certain vaccine and others may be interested in more, so member states may agree on a different kind of distribution [to go beyond the pro-rata distribution]," a Commission spokesperson said.

J Scott Marcus, a senior fellow at Bruegel, a Brussels-based business think-tank, said this was outlined in the AstraZeneca contract the EU released earlier this year.

It is "implicit in the APA (purchasing agreement) contract with AstraZeneca, and probably in the different contracts, that any Member State that has joined...can choose to take a separate allocation than that to which their population entitles them," he told Euronews.

He added Macron's comments implied that it's not clear "how things are handled if member states that previously chose to relinquish doses to which they were entitled subsequently decide that they want those doses after all."

A spokesperson for the German government also said in a statement provided to Euronews in January that "if EU member states did not want to claim for themselves the portion to which they were entitled according to their share of the people, or did not want to claim them entirely. the country ordered additional quantities for Germany."

The statement was given to Germany was being criticized for reports it negotiated bilateral deals with vaccine manufacturers. This practice is allowed if the Commission has not already negotiated an agreement with the pharmaceutical company.

European parliamentarians have called for greater transparency of vaccine dose allotments to member states and expected deliveries.

A transparent dose allocation report could help build trust and "address challenges associated to delays in supply and the speed at which vaccines are being administered," said MEP Pascal Canfin at the germ of the month.

That information currently endures for only a few member states. The Commission has said that member states are in charge of releasing information about the number of applications they are demanding.