Covid-19 roundup: Eu­ro­pean Com­mis­sion pre­pares to sue for As­traZeneca dos­es — re­port; NIH adds poly­clon­al an­ti­body to AC­TIV-2 tri­al

The Eu­ro­pean Com­mis­sion wants the vac­cine dos­es that As­traZeneca pledged to the bloc — and it’s will­ing to launch le­gal pro­ceed­ings to get them, ac­cord­ing to Politi­co.

The is­sue was raised at a meet­ing of am­bas­sadors on Wednes­day, dur­ing which a ma­jor­i­ty of EU coun­tries said they’d sup­port su­ing the drug­mak­er to get the dos­es ini­tial­ly promised in a con­tract, Politi­co re­port­ed.

As­traZeneca land­ed it­self in hot wa­ter back in Jan­u­ary when it in­formed the EU that pro­duc­tion lags would mean it can’t de­liv­er the promised num­ber of dos­es laid out in a sup­ply con­tract. The EU had cut a deal to pre-or­der 300 mil­lion dos­es, with an op­tion to add 100 mil­lion. But by the end of Q1, the com­pa­ny had on­ly de­liv­ered 30 mil­lion dos­es, as op­posed to the 100 mil­lion it promised.

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