Czech Republic and four other EU members call for “fair distribution of vaccines“

Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Bulgaria and Latvia have called for an EU summit to discuss what they claim to be "huge disparities" in the distribution of vaccines.

The leaders of the five states have sent a letter to European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen and the President of the European Council Charles Michel, claiming that “deliveries of vaccine doses by pharmaceutical companies to individual EU member states are not being implemented on an equal basis.”

They claim that if this were to carry on, it would create huge disparities among member states by this summer, whereby some would be able to reach herd immunity in a few weeks while others would lag far behind.

Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz suggested on Friday that some members of the European Union may have signed “secret contracts” with vaccine companies to receive more doses than they were entitled to under EU-wide agreements.