The European Union is ready to help drug companies expand coronavirus vaccine production to clear a "bottleneck" in distribution, its top health official said Saturday.
Health commissioner Stella Kyriakides told German news agency DPA that any delay in getting approved vaccines out was down to production capacity shortage, not EU planning.
"The bottleneck at the moment is not the volume of orders but the worldwide shortage of production capacity," she said, in comments distributed by her office.
Kyriakides noted that Brussels had provided 100 million euros to German firm BioNTech, which developed a vaccine with US giant Pfizer, to help build production capacity.
And she said that the bloc was ready to do more, for Pfizer-BioNTech and other companies with candidate vaccines, as the vaccination campaign gets into gear.
"The situation will improve step by step," she promised, one week after vaccinations began at widely varying paces among EU member states.
"We have been negotiating for additional vaccine doses from BioNTech for a long time and are again ready to help expand production capacities.
"Other manufacturers with whom we have contracts are on the verge of having their...
