Around 29 million doses of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine have been discovered by authorities following a raid in Italy.
It was first thought the jabs were destined for the UK, but had been stopped under the EU’s new vaccine export authorisation mechanism, Italian newspaper La Stampa reported. However, a UK government official told the BBC it was not expecting a delivery.
A spokesperson for the Italian Government has since said the batches, which were discovered in Anagni, near Rome, had all been ‘aimed for Belgium’.
In a statement, they said: ‘On Saturday, the European Commission asked the Prime Minister to verify some batches of vaccine at a production plant at Anangni. The Prime Minister informed the health minister who ordered an inspection between Saturday and Sunday, carried out by the Carabinieri.’
The vaccines were mostly made at AstraZeneca’s Halix plant, in the Netherlands, La Stampa claims. The plant has not yet been approved for EU production.
The number of doses found are almost double the 16 million so-far delivered to the EU by AstraZeneca. The drug company has been under fire from the commission for missed delivery targets for a number of weeks.
The bloc is now introducing a new mechanism that asks member states to consider ‘reciprocity’, whether the destination country restricts its own vaccine exports, when authorising exports of the jab.
They have also been asked to consider whether the ‘conditions prevailing’ in the destination country are ‘better or worse than the EU’s’, before deciding if the vaccine exports will be authorised.
Cargo ship drew giant penis in Red Sea before wedging itself in Suez CanalCommission executive vice-president Valdis Dombrovskis denied the export authorisation mechanism was targeting any one country, but said 10 million jabs had moved from the EU to the UK since it introduced checks and ‘zero doses’ had come back from British plants in return.
He argued that the controls are necessary because while the EU has become one of the ‘global hotspots of the pandemic’ and is also the ‘largest exporter of vaccines’.
Just over 11% of adults in the EU have received their first dose of a Covid vaccine, compared to 54% of those in the UK.
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
For more stories like this, check our news page.
