EU to sue AstraZeneca over vaccine supply shortfall

Brussels is to sue AstraZeneca over an alleged breach of its deal to supply vaccines to the EU, setting up a bruising legal battle after months of bitter disputes over large delivery shortfalls.

The company immediately fired back that it regretted the move and would “strongly defend” itself against litigation that it considered “without merit”.

The European Commission announced on Monday that it had launched the legal action on behalf of itself and the 27 EU member states.

“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 timely delivery of doses,” the commission said.

“What matters to us in this case is that we want to make sure that there’s a speedy delivery of a sufficient number of doses that European citizens are entitled to and which have been promised on the basis of the contract,” it added.

AstraZeneca is likely to deliver no more than a third of the 300m doses originally targeted in the contract for supply to the EU by the end of June.

The company insisted it had “fully complied” with the supply agreement, under which it committed to making “best reasonable efforts” to meet the delivery goals.

“Vaccines are difficult to manufacture, as evidenced by the supply challenges several companies are facing in Europe and around the world,” AstraZeneca said in a statement. “We are making progress addressing the technical challenges and our output is improving, but the production cycle of a vaccine is very long, which means these improvements take time to result in increased finished vaccine doses.”