Mr. Thierry Breton:

On the first question, as the committee will know, I was tasked with being the head of the European vaccine task force on 5 February.

To tell the committee the truth, I looked very carefully at the situation. When I started this new mission, it is true that I had the same feeling as Deputy Howlin. I will tell him very honestly, I do not share his view. I respect his position because I know that his view is probably widely spread, even though I would like to share with the Parliament that it is not exactly my view.

The US, the UK and Israel were mentioned. As member states, we can be proud that this is again a tremendous success for European science. Four of the five vaccines that will be approved have been developed in Europe. It is fair to say that if science has been developed here in Europe, we have been able to benefit from the US agency, which was put in place in 2006 after the events of 9/11 in order to cope with biological war or similar attacks. This agency has the ability to put in a lot of money to accelerate development in cases of necessity and this is what happened. In other words, we developed science on this side of the Atlantic and we were able to partner with our US friends to benefit from the money they have been able to put in, including in European companies, to speed up the way we deliver vaccines which are working. At the same time, as Deputy Howlin rightly said, we had to ramp up our industrial base extremely quickly, as never in history, to be able to produce enough vaccines for everyone.

I do not want to criticise the US because, in my position, I respect everyone. However, the US made an executive order stating that it will not export one single drop of vaccine until it has reached immunity. We are the only ones to decide that 60% of our production will be dedicated to member states and 40% for export to our friends and partners, including, by the way, NATO members. We are the only one to do this in Europe. We have been able to ramp up 53 factories very quickly. It was my task to make sure that everything was working on time. It is my pleasure to report to the joint committee today that we have developed this at exactly the same speed as the US. In other words, at the end of quarter 1 both the US and Europe have been able to produce roughly 12 million doses and now we are accelerating. I believe that at the end of the year we will be producing more vaccines than the US.

The point about Israel is very interesting. I would not encourage the monitoring or control of what is happening in another country. Israel is an important country and has 9 million inhabitants. There was an agreement between Pfizer and Israel to get the required doses to vaccinate 50% of the population in exchange for a health study in an anonymised way. That is what has been done. We produced the vaccines for Israel in our factories in Europe. It is important for Pfizer to monitor the process. It would have been impossible, first, if we had not produced enough doses. In Europe, like in the US, we produced and delivered 14 million does in January. In February, we produced 28 million doses, in March, 60 million, and in April, 120 million doses. We could not do the same thing with our 446 million inhabitants.

We signed an agreement with AstraZeneca in August one day before the UK did so. We were the first to sign. We are still in the process of investigating the reasons. We ordered 120 million doses from AstraZeneca in quarter 1 and 180 million doses in quarter 2 but, unfortunately, the company delivered only 30 million doses. In other words, it delivered only 25% of its commitment to us in Europe in quarter 1, while we understand that it delivered everything which was planned for British citizens. It is not my intention to make any comments, except that if AstraZeneca, which has its headquarters in London, had delivered on its commitment on the other side of the Channel, we would today be the first ones to be vaccinated. The good news is that we are accelerating dramatically and we will be able to deliver probably enough vaccines so that by mid-July Ireland will receive enough doses to be able to vaccinate at least 70% of the adult population, which is extremely important, while the UK said its target was one dose by the end of July for each British citizen. By the way, I would like to tell the committee-----