Macron and Merkel call on the United States to authorize the export of vaccines

A clear position taken by European leaders. French President Emmanuel Macron on Saturday called on the United States to lift all restrictions on the export of vaccines and vaccine components against Covid-19 which, according to him, limit production in Europe. A call relayed by Chancellor Angela Merkel, who asks the United States to “open the market” and allow exports.

“I call very clearly on the United States to end the export bans, not only of vaccines but of components of these vaccines which prevent production,” Emmanuel Macron told the press at the European social summit in Porto. The key to producing vaccines faster for poor countries and intermediate countries is to produce more: lift export bans. “

Curevac vaccine blocked

The German laboratory Curevac, whose vaccine is not yet approved but is due to play an important role in European vaccination campaigns, “says it cannot produce in Europe because the components are blocked in the United States”, he accused.

“I wish that now that a large part of the American population has been vaccinated, we can have a free exchange of components and also an opening of the vaccine market,” Angela Merkel also said at a press conference since. Porto, stressing that the European Union exported, for its part, a “large part” of its vaccine production.

For Macron, the priority is not the lifting of patents

Regarding Joe Biden’s proposal to lift the patents on Covid-19 vaccines, which forced Europeans to take a position, Emmanuel Macron said he was open to “a circumscribed lifting”, on the model of treatments against AIDS, but that the urgency was not there. And he estimated that Europe was much more generous in fact than the United States because it had exported half of the 400 million doses produced on its soil.

The President of the Republic again explained that, according to him, the priority was not to lift the patents – in other words to no longer pay royalties to the American laboratories inventing vaccines – but to carry out technology transfers to install production sites in poor countries, citing Senegal, India and South Africa, where he will soon go to inaugurate a factory assisted by the EU. Lifting patents “will be an answer, but only when we have produced enough vaccines and it will only be a question of cost,” he said.

The head of state annoyed

The French president also vigorously rebelled against the idea that the United States seemed to be taking moral leadership through its patent proposal, which was relayed to the Pope on Saturday morning.

“When, a year ago, we Europeans launched Act-A,” he told the press about the initiative to develop vaccines, drugs and diagnostic tools and to strengthen the health systems around the world, “you don’t tell us ‘you Europeans have moral leadership’, you say ‘the United States is not following you’. And when the United States follows us, you say they have the leadership ”.

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