Berlin-based newspaper Bild even announced that the first German to be vaccinated for coronavirus lived in the UK. Another German newspaper, Der Spiegel has also attacked the EU’s slower common EU vaccine scheme. Der Spiegel wrote: “The EU appears to have bought too little, too late and at times from the wrong producers.”
In Germany cases of coronavirus are soaring.
German health minister Jens Spahn announced the government had only 400,000 vaccine doses.
He added that the millions needed would not be available until well into the new year.
The situation in the UK is drastically different, where the Government has already delivered 500,000 doses.
German newspaper Der Spiegel said this efficiency failure was down to slow EU bureaucratic decisions.
The newspaper stated that the EU “didn’t place concrete orders until mid-November”.
The bloc also purchased too few doses of the vaccine.
The newspaper said the EU focussed on the wrong producers of vaccines.
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The EU’s buyers ignored companies from outside the EU that showed more promising early trial results.
Many EU states even opposed Berlin’s attempts to procure more Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines.
One of the EU procurement insiders told Der Spiegel that “buying more from a German company wasn’t on the cards”.
This was in order to achieve balance with the French company that was also producing vaccines.
The EU criticised the UK’s “hasty” roll-out of the Pfizer/ BioNTech vaccine.
A spokesman for the European Commission, the EU executive, said the European Medicines Agency’s (EMA) slower procedure was “the most effective regulatory mechanism to grant all EU citizens’ access to a safe and effective vaccine”.
The spokesperson said the slower delivery was because they needed to make a decision that was based on more evidence.
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