UK pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca is two months behind the schedule producing its coronavirus vaccine, but February supplies to Europe will still count millions of doses, CEO Pascal Soriot said
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 27th January, 2021) UK pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca is two months behind the schedule producing its coronavirus vaccine, but February supplies to Europe will still count millions of doses, CEO Pascal Soriot said.
Soriot gave interviews to several European media amid controversy around the delayed supply of contracted amounts of doses to the European Union.
"It's complicated, especially in the early phase where you have to really kind of sort out all sorts of issues. We believe we've sorted out those issues, but we are basically two months behind where we wanted to be," Soriot told Italian newspaper La Repubblica.
AstraZeneca chief executive stressed that its commitment under the contracts was "our best effort," which implies a certain degree of flexibility, but added that the company was "getting there, in two or three months we will be at scale."
AstraZeneca produces the vaccine substance for Europe at two facilities � in Belgium and the Netherlands � and according to Soriot, the current delays in production have to do with "manufacturing the drug's substance."
"The issues are different, for instance, in Belgium: we believe it was more a question of downstream filtering," Soriot said, going on to reiterate that the issues were now fixed and the first supplies to Europe in February would still count millions of doses, albeit fewer than initially contracted.
Soriot pointed out that Europe would get 17 percent of the company's total February supply while accommodating only 5 percent of the world population.
"We are in the ramp-up phase and basically it will improve, but it takes time. Having said all of this, I'm not looking for excuses, honestly. We take accountability. We want to do better and we're working day and night," the official said.
According to Soriot, AstraZeneca is also continuing the collaboration with the University of Oxford to develop a new vaccine against the South African variant of the virus.
"We're also working on a vaccine with Oxford University that will target the variant. In the meantime, I don't think people should worry so much, because this variant is not that common in Europe and elsewhere," Soriot was quoted as saying.
Meanwhile, countries across Europe sounded the alarm for weeks over detecting more and more mutated strains, including the ones from South Africa and England, in their daily COVID-19 tallies. It was because of the new variants that the European Union toughened travel regulations earlier this week and vowed to set up a transparency mechanism to monitor the distribution of vaccines by partner producers.
