AstraZeneca Plc faces a lawsuit filed by the EU commission over failing to deliver vaccines

The European Union said it was filing a lawsuit against AstraZeneca Plc [AZN] over its failure to deliver on its Covid-19 vaccine contract. This shows how desperate governments are to secure scarce doses. The EU’s health commissioner, Stella Kyriakides took on the Twitter platform on Monday and said, “Our priority is to ensure #Covid-19 vaccine deliveries take place.” The EU commission said the suit was filed on Friday in a Brussels court. Commission officials further said their goal was to receive their contracted doses, not to punish the company. whereas, AstraZeneca was not happy with the action and said it regretted the commission’s decision to take legal action and was looking forward to working with it “to vaccinate as many people as possible.” It said, We welcome this opportunity to resolve this dispute as soon as possible. The company later said it would be unable to significantly increase vaccine deliveries in the immediate future.EU spokesman Stefan De Keersmaecker said, The Commission has started last Friday a legal action against the company AstraZeneca on the basis of breaches of the advanced purchase agreement. Some terms of the contract have not been respected and the company has not been in a position to come up with a reliable strategy to ensure the timely delivery of doses. He said the only aim of the union was to have a speedy delivery of a sufficient number of doses that “European citizens are entitled to, and which have been promised on the basis of the contract.”