Five EU states seek summit on ‘unfair’ vaccine handouts

VIENNA: Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Bulgaria and Latvia have called for an EU summit to discuss “huge disparities” in the distribution of vaccines, according to a letter published on Saturday.

Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz suggested Friday that some members of the European Union may have signed “secret contracts” with vaccine companies to receive more doses than they were entitled to under EU-wide agreements.

An EU spokesman has said that it was up to members states to “ask less or more of a given vaccine”, while another EU official on Saturday said that “the coordination in the fight against the pandemic” will be the first point of discussions during the next summit, already scheduled for the end of March.

Kurz and his four counterparts on Friday sent a letter to Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, and Charles Michel, president of the European Council, claiming that “deliveries of vaccine doses by pharma companies to individual EU member states are not being implemented on an equal basis.”

“If this system were to carry on, it would continue creating and exacerbating huge disparities among member states by this summer, whereby some would be able to reach herd immunity in a few weeks while others would lag far behind,” the letter said.

“We therefore call on you... to hold a discussion on this important matter among leaders as soon as possible,” it said. Kurz on Friday described “bazaars” where some member states made additional agreements with vaccine companies.

The Austrian health ministry also dismissed Kurz’s claims, reiterating the EU’s statement that each member state was allowed to say how many doses of the various vaccines it wanted to procure.

“These were very balanced and transparent negotiations,” Ines Stilling, general secretary of the Austrian health ministry, said in an interview with the public broadcaster Saturday.

The European Union has blamed its sluggish vaccine rollout on supply and delivery problems and continues to lag behind the United States, Israel and Britain in terms of the percentage of the population that has already received at least one dose.