Boris Johnson assured me EU could get vaccines from UK factories, says Ursula von der Leyen

Ursula von der Leyen has claimed she had secured assurances from Boris Johnson that the EU could receive vaccine supplies from AstraZeneca factories in Britain.

The European Commission president said on Sunday night that the Prime Minister had promised Britain was not seeking exclusive access to the supplies of the jab.

The British Government has never said it wanted exclusive access to the supplies. It has an agreement with AstraZeneca that stipulates that the company must supply the UK with 100million vaccines before it can ship to elsewhere.

“I was glad that he guaranteed that the two factories who produce AstraZeneca will of course supply to Europe, just as European vaccine doses for example from [Pfizer] BioNTech are being delivered to Britain,” said Mrs von der Leyen on German television on Sunday.

There were fears that vaccines from Pfizer’s Belgian plant could be stopped from being exported to Britain after the European Commission threatened an export ban, as its row with AstraZeneca spiralled out of control last week.

It is thought Mr Johnson was offered similar assurances over the EU supply of vaccines to Britain.

Mrs von der Leyen was forced into a humiliating climbdown after announcing Brussels would trigger Article 16 of the Northern Ireland Protocol, which would lead to a hard border on the island of Ireland, to prevent vaccines being smuggled into Britain from Northern Ireland.

On Sunday night Mrs von der Leyen said that AstraZeneca had promised nine million more vaccines, that deliveries would begin a week earlier and that manufacturing in Europe would be boosted.

At this stage it is not clear where the extra nine million vaccines, which still means the EU has about half the jabs it wanted, will come from.

The under-fire president of the European Commission insisted the EU is making “good progress” with its coronavirus vaccine strategy, despite the gaffe and the slow rollout of vaccinations in the bloc.

She doubled down on her target of ensuring that 70 per cent of EU citizens be vaccinated by summer in the television interview, which was aimed at repairing the damage of the past week. And she denied that the EU was losing the vaccine race to Britain. “I think the only race we are in right now is against the virus and against time,” she said.

The bitter row was sparked after AstraZeneca told Brussels that it would only be able to supply a quarter, about 25million, of the 100million jabs promised for the first quarter of the year.

The commission, which negotiated on behalf of the 27 member states, suspects the company may have sold EU reserved stock to other countries, such as the UK and USA, who had paid a higher price.

It launched an unprecedented slew of public attacks against the British-Swedish company and rejected a peace offering of an extra eight million vaccines last week.

On Monday, Mrs von der Leyen announced that an extra 75million doses of the Pfizer vaccine would be delivered to the EU in the second quarter. However, she had already announced the increase in supplies in a Jan 8 speech, before the row with AstraZeneca erupted.

The German pharmaceutical giant Bayer has agreed to help CureVac produce its experimental Covid-19 vaccine, the latest drugmaker to offer up manufacturing capacity as pressure mounts to boost supplies.

It expects to produce 160million doses of CureVac’s shot in 2022 at its Wuppertal site in western Germany, head of pharma Stefan Oelrich told a news conference on Monday.