Quote:
Originally Posted by jonbxx
Remember though that like the UK, the member states could have set up Emergency Use Authorisations under EU law but chose not to (or at least didn't early on, Hungary has one on the go for Sputnik V) This is from Art. 5(2) of Directive 2001/83;
There's big questions from the public at least in Germany on why governments didn't do this
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Member states didn’t even have to participate in the vaccine procurement programme but the fact that they all did simply lends weight to the argument that there was a political, symbolic motive running alongside the public health concerns. A number of EU states were already well advanced in their own plans and they abandoned them in order to go with the EU scheme.
The real significance of them locking themselves into this scheme isn’t in the drug approvals process however. It’s in the scheme’s stipulation that a member state is not allowed to negotiate separately with any manufacturer that the EU is negotiating with. That’s why the group led by Germany stopped its activity. Any one of them could approve any drug at any time, but there could have been no advantage to them in doing that. They couldn’t have got supplies of any Western vaccine any quicker within the rules of the programme they locked themselves in to.
Hungary went with Sputnik V but as that was being rolled out for use on the basis of phase 1 and 2 clinical trials, with phase 3 still ongoing, that was a risk. Serbia and others that have bought the Sinopharm vaccine have likewise taken a chance that the Chinese government isn’t hiding anything. That’s a big assumption on any day of the week.