European Union member states have received only about a third of the quarterly target for COVID-19 vaccines produced by Moderna Inc., according to a delivery schedule published by a Hungarian official on Facebook.
The bloc is slated to receive 10 million of the shots in the January-March period, with deliveries set to accelerate later in the year, the data show. That compares with just over 3.4 million distributed so far to member states since the vaccine was approved in January, according to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.
The schedule refers to the 160 million doses procured by the EU in November, before a deal last month to buy an additional 150 million shots both this year and next. The EU has been under pressure to speed up a sluggish vaccine roll-out that’s lagged several peers, including the U.S. and the U.K.
Gergely Gulyas, the cabinet minister to Prime Minister Viktor Orban in Hungary’s government, published the schedule in defense of a decision to opt out of additional purchases.
Nationally procured vaccines from China’s Sinopharm and Russia’s Sputnik V will allow Hungary to inoculate all of its population aged over 18 by the third quarter, Gulyas said in the Facebook post. That gives little reason to buy supplies via the EU that would probably only arrive after that time, he said.
