AstraZeneca court case: EU says company did ‘not even try’ to meet Covid vaccine contract

AstraZeneca did ‘not even try’ to meet Covid vaccine contract, EU tells court Commission demands €10 per dose for each day of delay as compensation the Guardian

The European Commission has demanded an urgent court order requiring AstraZeneca to deliver millions more vaccines to the bloc or face a hefty fine, in a case that may reflect its anger more than its need for doses.

“AstraZeneca did not even try to respect the contract,” the EU’s lawyer, Rafaël Jafferali, told a court in Brussels on Wednesday, saying the EU wanted €10 per dose for each day of delay as compensation for the company’s alleged non-compliance.

Jafferali said the penalty should apply from 1 July if AstraZeneca did not deliver at least 120m doses by the end of June and that the EU would also seek a penalty of at least €10m for each breach of the contract that the judge may eventually decide.

AstraZeneca supplied only 30m of the 120m Covid-19 vaccine doses it was scheduled to deliver to the bloc by the end of March and had delivered only 50m by early May. It is on course to deliver 70m of a promised 180m in the second quarter.

The commission argued the company should have used all four production plants listed in its contract –including two in the UK – – in line with a “best reasonable efforts” clause, and said 50m doses made in the Britain, the US and the Netherlands that should have been delivered to the EU were “diverted” to other countries. ...

AstraZeneca’s lawyer, Hakim Boularbah, told the court that the contract was “not for the delivery of shoes or T-shirts”, adding that manufacturing a new vaccine was a complex business and the EU’s accusations were “shocking”.

The company has repeatedly said the contract was not binding as it only committed to make “best reasonable efforts”. Jafferali said doses produced in Britain were reserved under a contract the British government signed with the University of Oxford. ...