Lisbon, 13 Jan 2021 (Lusa) - The European Union's commissioner for health, Stella Kyriakides, warned on Wednesday that "parallel negotiations" for the purchase of vaccines "undermine the effectiveness" of the European Commission's strategy, following reports that some member states had been seeking such deals.

"Since the beginning [of the pandemic] we have stressed that our vaccination strategy involves developing a diversified portfolio of vaccines," Kyriakides said at a news conference held after an informal meeting of ministers of health from the 27 EU member states.

"One of the guiding principles is to avoid parallel negotiations because they would undermine the effectiveness of this strategy," she said, adding that she was "very confident" that "all member states intend to comply with this agreement."

The commissioner was speaking at a joint news conference with Portugal's minister, Marta Temido, who was chairing the informal meeting of ministers by videoconference from Lisbon's Centro Cultural de Belém to take stock of strategies for vaccination against Covid-19 and for combating the pandemic.

Temido backed up the call for "joint purchase of Covid-19 vaccines", stressing that this gives a clear advantage to EU members.

"We have come this far because we have kept working together to support funding instruments for vaccine development, to support joint purchases, to support distribution, ensuring access to all countries at the same time, and to support the allocation of population-based quantities to each country," she said.

"Article 7 of the joint-purchase agreements refers to this aspect and therefore what it refers to is clear on this matter," she added, in response to a question about reports of possible parallel purchases by some member states.

According to Temido, who in the first half of 2021 is to chair meetings of EU health ministers as part of Portugal's presidency of the Council of the EU, only the first steps have so far been taken in a process of vaccination that "will be long", meaning that she wanted to stress "the need once again to maintain non-pharmacological measures."

The EU's 27 member states last June mandated the European Commission to negotiate on their behalf the purchase of vaccines against Covid-19, but in recent weeks reports have emerged of Germany having signed contracts for 30 million additional doses and Cyprus being in negotiations with Israel for the parallel supply of vaccines.

Worldwide, the Covid-19 pandemic has claimed at least 1,963,557 lives out of more than 91.5 million cases of infection with the novel coronavirus that causes the disease.

In Portugal, there have been 8,236 deaths associated with Covid-19, out of 507,108 confirmed cases of infection, according to the latest bulletin from the Directorate-General for Health.

BYC/ARO // ARO.

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