(The Guardian) The EU may halt exports of Covid-19 vaccines to Britain to safeguard scarce doses for its own citizens unless the UK starts shipping shots to the bloc, the European commission president has said.
“We want to see reciprocity and proportionality in exports and we are ready to use whatever tool we need to deliver on that,” Ursula von der Leyen said on Wednesday. “This is about making sure that Europe gets its fair share.”
She said the EU had received more than 300 requests for overseas vaccine shipments over the past six weeks and refused just one, and the bloc had exported 41m doses to 33 countries.
“This shows that Europe is trying to make international cooperation work,” she said. “But open roads run in both directions … It is hard to explain to our citizens why vaccines produced in the EU are going to other countries that are also producing vaccines, but hardly anything is coming back.”
