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EU countries agree to share ‘solidarity vaccines’ with states in need
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Most European Union member states on Thursday agreed to share part of their upcoming vaccine deliveries with the five EU countries they said need them most.
The EU’s vaccine doses are usually distributed between the bloc’s 27 countries based on population size.
After days of negotiations, EU ambassadors on Thursday agreed to change that system for 10 million BioNTech-Pfizer doses due to be delivered in the second quarter, so needier countries received more.
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Of those 10 million doses, 2.85 million so-called “solidarity vaccines” will be shared between five countries, according to a statement from Portugal, which chairs meetings of EU ambassadors.
Those countries are Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Latvia and Slovakia. They will also receive their pro-rata share of the total 10 million doses.
To make that happen, 19 EU countries agreed to receive a pro-rata share of a smaller total of 6.66 million doses, the statement said.
“We have provided Croatia with an additional 747,000 doses of Pfizer-BioNTech by the end of June this year,” Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic said in a statement.