Britain expects its contractual arrangements on coronavirus vaccines to be honoured following disagreements with the EU over supplies of the shot, Cabinet Office Minister Michael Gove said yesterday.
Following a u-turn by the European Commission over threats on Friday to stop the free-flow of vaccines over the Irish border, Gove said Britain was “confident” its supplies of vaccines would be delivered.
“We’ve entered into contractual arrangements with AstraZeneca and Pfizer, we expect those arrangements to be honoured,” the minister said.
He added that after exchanges with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen was “clear that she understood exactly the UK government’s position”.
Gove said the European Union made a mistake when it threatened to invoke Article 16 of the post-Brexit Northern Ireland Protocol to monitor and in some cases block exports of vaccines produced in EU plants.
“They recognise that they have made a mistake,” he said. “We want to work with our friends and neighbours in the European Union. We recognise some of the difficulties and the pressures that they face,” Gove added.
Johnson held conversations late on Friday with Von der Leyen as the row over shortages of a Covid-19 vaccine developed by the British-Swedish drugs group AstraZeneca threatened to boil over.
British Foreign Minister Dominic Raab wrote on Twitter yesterday that during conversations with EU Commission vice president Valdis Dombrovkis he had been “reassured the EU has no desire to block suppliers fulfilling contracts for vaccine distribution to the UK”.
“The world is watching and it is only through international collaboration that we will beat this pandemic,” he added.
Johnson had told EU chief Ursula von der Leyen of his “grave concerns about the potential impact” the European bloc’s decision might have.
Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, told The Times newspaper Brussels needed to step back from the escalating row over vaccines. “We are facing an extraordinarily serious crisis, which is creating a lot of suffering, which is causing a lot of deaths in the UK, in France, in Germany, everywhere,” he said.
“I believe that we must face this crisis with responsibility, certainly not with the spirit of one upmanship or unhealthy competition,” Barnier added.
The EU still has plans to go ahead with a broader vaccine export ban which could impact on supplies of the Pfizer-Biontech jab in Britain.
Meanwhile Britain yesterday recorded 1,200 deaths from Covid-19, down from 1,245 the day before, and a further 23,275 cases of the disease, also a decrease from a day earlier.
The figures record deaths of those who tested positive for the coronavirus within the past 28 days.
Official data showed that 8.38mn people have been given the first dose of a vaccine, up from a figure of 7.89mn people announced on Friday.
Lecturers Emma Bush (left) and Dr Jacquie White (right) train vaccinator volunteers to prepare them to be deployed to assist in the national Covid-19 vaccination programme, in the Allam Medical Building at the University of Hull, northern England, yesterday.
