BERLIN (Reuters) – Germany expects British drug dealer AstraZeneca Plc to deliver 3 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine in February despite the company’s latest production problems, Health Minister Jens said Spahn to Bild newspaper on Sunday.
AstraZeneca informed EU officials on Friday that it would cut delivery of the COVID-19 vaccine to the 60% block to 31 million doses in the first quarter of the year due to production problems, a senior official told Reuters.
The reduction addresses another blow to Europe’s COVID-19 vaccine campaign after Pfizer Inc and German partner BioNTech delayed their vaccination for the bloc this week, says that the move was necessary due to work to ramp up production.
“The good news is that if the AstraZeneca vaccine is approved at the end of January, we expect at least 3 million vaccine doses for Germany in February,” Spahn told Bild on Sunday in an interview.
Spahn admitted this was not lower than expected. The delay showed that vaccine production was a much more complex task than some media headlines suggested, he said.
Spahn renewed his promise that the government would be able to make a vaccination offer to all citizens who wanted to be shot in the summer. “If the expected licenses for more vaccines come, it will stay that way,” Spahn said.
The government was also committed to its goal of vaccinating willing citizens older than 80 years by the end of March, Spahn said.
The minister rejected criticism that Germany was missing other countries in its immunization effort.
“We can make meaningful comparisons in two or three months,” Spahn said, adding that Germany had decided to start vaccinations in nursing homes, which he described as more complex and labor-intensive. time.
Reporting by Michael Nienaber; Edited by Alex Richardson