The EU has taken another step in pandemic preparedness—but for what diseases remains unclear. The EU Commission announced on June 30th that it had purchased vaccine production capacity at four pharmaceutical companies.
The Commission signed the deal “for sufficient and agile manufacturing capacities,” with Spanish vaccine makers HIPRA and CZ, the Dutch company Bilthoven Biologicals, and U.S. pharmaceutical giant Pfizer.
Under the contract, the EU is paying €160 million per year for the companies to maintain the production capacity to make 325 million doses a year.
The contract does not specify which diseases the vaccines would prevent but includes three different vaccine types—mRNA-based, vector-based, and protein-based vaccines.
Company capacities such as facilities, staff, and supplies “will be kept operational and can be activated quickly, securing a total of 325 million doses per year in case of a public health emergency,” the Commission explained in a press release.
The arrangement is designed to “close the gap between manufacturing and scaling up of vaccine production while ensuring the capacity of the industry to produce life-saving medicines.”
It was brokered on behalf of the Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority (HERA), the European Health and Digital Executive Agency (HaDEA) under the EU FAB program. These were all established in 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic to address future pandemics.
Politico reports that this is the first commercial result of the program, but not the first contract of its kind.
The EU already has similar deals for the production of avian influenza vaccines with both GlaxoSmithKline and Seqirus. The infectious disease, also known as bird flu, is considered a prime candidate to cause the next pandemic, as the continent suffered the worst-known outbreak of the disease among wild and domestic birds in 2022. Most worryingly, the disease can spread to mammals, both wild and domestic. In one particularly bad outbreak, bird flu spread among minks at a farm in Spain. So far, human cases have been rare but can be deadly.
Other measures to prepare for future pandemics cause more concern, including the development of a global digital vaccination document undertaken jointly by the EU and the WHO, and the so-call Pandemic Treaty, which would oblige all 194 member states to follow the WHO’s guidelines for quarantine measures, border closures, and vaccine requirements during a WHO-proclaimed pandemic.
