“Today, the European Commission approved a fourth contract with pharmaceutical companies BioNTech and Pfizer, which provides for the initial purchase of 200 million doses on behalf of all EU Member States, plus an option to request up to a further 100 million doses, to be supplied once a vaccine has proven to be safe and effective against COVID-19,” the EU said in a statement on Wednesday.
“The Commission has taken a decision to support this vaccine based on a sound scientific assessment, the technology used, the companies’ experience in vaccine development and their production capacity to supply the whole of the EU.”
Initial trial results were published by the companies on Monday and the BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine is likely to be first to receive regulatory approval after proving to be more than 90 per cent effective.
BioNTech executives said this could come within weeks.
Pfizer said it expected deliveries to begin by the end of the year.
The supply agreement with the European Commission is the largest initial order Pfizer and BioNTech have received to date.
The two-dose vaccine will be made in Germany and Belgium, and member states that opted into the deal will place orders separately, the companies said.
BioNTech is a German company working with US-based Pfizer to develop a new vaccine based on messenger RNA (mRNA), which plays a fundamental role in biology, transferring instructions from DNA to cells’ protein making machinery.
In an mRNA vaccine, these instructions make harmless fragments of the virus which the human body uses to build an immune response to prevent or fight disease.
The EU has already signed supply deals with AstraZeneca, Sanofi and Johnson & Johnson for their experimental COVID-19 shots, and is talking with Moderna, CureVac and Novavax to secure their vaccines.
