EU ending approval system for Covid vaccine exports

The EU will end its mandatory checks-and-approval system for Covid-19 vaccine exports when it expires at the end of the year, the European Commission said on Friday.

The mechanism, brought in January 29, was used in April to ban a shipment of 250,000 AstraZeneca doses to Australia, at a time that the European Union was struggling with low vaccine supplies.

Now the 27-nation bloc has fully vaccinated 68 percent of its population of 445 million and has ample stocks for a booster campaign that has started in several member states. The EU has pre-purchase agreements for up to 4.6 billion doses of eight different Covid vaccines, half of them coming from BioNTech/Pfizer.

A commission spokeswoman, Dana Spinant, said the export authorisation mechanism would be replaced from January 1 with a “new monitoring mechanism that will provide the commission with timely, company-specific, vaccine export” information.

She added that “the EU is the biggest global provider of Covid-19 vaccines, with over 1.3 billion doses exported so far since December, to more than 150 countries”.