EU, AstraZeneca publish heavily redacted deal in vaccine row

BRUSSELS (AP) — The European Union and AstraZeneca agreed Friday to make public a heavily redacted version of their coronavirus vaccine agreement, which lies at the heart of a dispute over how many shots the pharmaceutical company should be supplying the EU's 27 nations.

The contract, agreed to last year by the European Commission and the drugmaker, allows the EU’s member countries to buy 300 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, with an option for a further 100 million doses. It’s one of several contracts the EU’s executive branch has with vaccine makers to secure a total of more than 2 billion shots.

As part of the “advanced purchase agreement" with vaccine companies, the EU has invested 336 million euros ($408 million) to finance the production of AstraZeneca vaccines at four factories.

But the EU lashed out at the British-Swedish drugmaker this week after it said it would not be able to deliver the 80 million doses that it hoped to provide initially and could only supply 31 million. Brussels claimed AstraZeneca would supply even less than that, just one-quarter of the doses due between January and March, and, member countries began to complain.

The European Commission, which is the EU"s executive arm, is concerned that doses meant for Europe might have been diverted from an AstraZeneca plant on the continent to the United Kingdom, where two other company sites are located. The EU also wants doses at two sites in Britain to be made available to European citizens.

AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot told Germany's Die Welt newspaper this week that the U.K. government helped create the vaccine developed with Oxford University and signed its contract three months before the EU did. Soriot said that under the British contract, vaccines produced at U.K. sites must go to the U.K. first.

The “advanced...