AstraZeneca chief executive Pascal Soriot has attributed its vaccine delivery shortfall in Europe to production teething problems and the EUs delay in signing a contract with the Swedish pharmaceutical firm.
Mr Soriot said he understands frustration with his company but hit back at claims that its cut in vaccine dose delivery to the EU was allowing it prioritise the UK and other customers.
The European Commission has described delays in vaccine delivery 40 per cent below targets in March as not acceptable, with some EU member states threatening legal action.
Mr Soriot said such threats are baseless, claiming his company had always only promised its best effort to supply the EU in parallel with the UK.
The companys problems at EU production plants in the Netherlands and Belgium, he said, are due to a lower output in some production tanks containing vaccine culture.
We had similar teething problems in the UK but the contract with the British was signed three months before that with Brussels and we had three months more time to sort out issues, he told Germanys Die Welt daily and Italys La Repubblica.
The AstraZeneca chief executive said his company was not profiteering or price-gouging, as it had undertaken to produce the vaccine in conjunction with Oxford University on a non-profit basis. Nor would the French-born manager tolerate any preferred treatment for non-EU customers.
Im a European, our chairman is too, as is our finance chief, he said.
As for German media claims that the vaccine had an efficacy of merely 8 percent in the elderly population, Mr Soriot said he had no idea where such claims came from.
How can one assume that testing bodies around the world would grant a licence to a substance with only eight per cent efficacy, he asked.
The companys vaccine is already being used in the UK, with the EUs medical approval likely to follow next week.
Pending approval the company will deliver three million doses to the EU, increasing each week until a ceiling of 17 million per seven days is reached. The doses will be divided and distributed around the EU based on population size.
Calling into doubt the vaccines efficacy, he warned, was a gift to anti-vaccine movements gathering strength around the continent.
Whoever has something to say about security or efficacy should do it in scientific circles, its disgraceful to do this for political means because it reduces the trust in vaccination, he said.
Among the concerns raised about the vaccines efficacy are how only eight percent of the subjects in the Oxford vaccine trials were between 56 and 69 years of age, and only three to four percent were over 70 years of age.
Mr Soriot said that ethical reasons were behind the low numbers of older test subjects.
Oxford … didnt want to test older people until they had enough data from the 18-55 year-old group, he said. But we have robust data that prove a strong antibody production against the virus among older people.
He said it was too soon to tell whether the companys vaccine would protect against virus mutations already in circulation.
Politicians across Europe have backed calls to introduce export permits for vaccines, amid concerns that AstraZenecas EU-based factories was prioritising production for other areas in the world at the expense of Europeans.
Mr Soriot said such talk of export restrictions was exactly the opposite of undertakings given by the European Commission in recent months. Such proposals for its EU production facilities, he added, risked undermining the companys international delivery chain.
The French executive suggested a lack of global readiness for pandemics, and the resulting lapse into nationalist instincts, was the main challenge in tackling the pandemic.
Vaccine development in record time could have been a Fourth of July, Independence Day kind of a moment but it unfortunately wasnt because there was a little bit of me first behaviour, he told a virtual panel of the World Economic Forum.
As well as a battle with Brussels, the Swedish company is being sued by a pension fund on behalf of its investors, claiming they suffered losses because of flaws in the companys testing of its coronavirus vaccine.
The Swedish company says it had similar ‘teething problems’ with UK delivery
