Business Group Warns EU Over Vaccine Export Controls

Brussels, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 29th Jan, 2021 ) :EU export controls on Covid-19 vaccines could have a "devastating" impact on global supplies, the International Chamber of Commerce has warned European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen.

Plans to give EU member states the power to block some exports "risk triggering retaliatory actions by third countries that could very rapidly erode essential supply chains," ICC Secretary General John Denton wrote in the letter dated Thursday and seen by AFP on Friday.

"Such a chain of events... would have devastating implications on the supply of vaccines globally, including across EU member states," he wrote.

The letter was also sent to the EU commissioners for health and for trade, Stella Kyriakides and Valdis Dombrovskis, who are tasked with setting up the vaccine export licencing scheme.

The initiative was launched this week after the European Commission got into a row with Anglo-Swedish pharmaceutical group AstraZeneca over a huge shortfall in Covid-19 vaccine doses it was meant to have delivered.

The company has said its priority is to supply Britain, which signed its contract three months before the EU did.

But the Commission argues there is no "first-come, first-served" clause in its contract with AstraZeneca and the company's two UK plants are listed among the four supply bases to fulfil the EU contract.

The ICC said it believed the EU's export licencing scheme was "well intentioned" but was misguided given that "vaccine supply chains are inherently global in nature".

It presented a study suggesting scarcity of vaccines in middle- and lower-income countries could impose losses of trillions of Dollars on the global economy -- half of which would be borne by the advanced economies.