Germany in preliminary talks with Russia to secure Sputnik vaccine

Cracks are developing in the EU’s joint Covid-19 vaccine procurement programme as Germany signalled it is ready to follow Hungary, Austria and Slovakia in securing directly millions of Russian vaccine.

Six months ahead of Germany’s federal election, amid voter fury over a fumbled vaccine rollout, federal health minister Jens Spahn said preliminary talks were under way with Moscow to secure doses of the Sputnik V vaccine.

Mr Spahn said Germany would go it alone as soon as the vaccine was approved by the European Medicines Agency (EMA). His announcement came a day after the southern German state of Bavaria said it had signed its own letter of intent to buy 2.5 million doses of Sputnik V if it is cleared by the EMA.

Officials in Berlin and Munich have denied breaking with the EU practice where the European Commission negotiated mass orders of BioNTech, AstraZeneca and other vaccines on behalf of member states.

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“The EU Commission said yesterday that it will not sign contracts [for Sputnik] as for other manufacturers,” Mr Spahn told German public broadcaster WDR, “so for Germany in the meeting of EU health ministers I said that we will hold bilateral talks with Russia.”

A commission spokesman said on Thursday that member states were entitled to negotiate and sign contracts with manufacturers not covered by the EU’s own portfolio.

“But where we are talking about a vaccine which is part of our portfolio then . . . we do not accept parallel negotiations,” said the spokesman. “For the time being there are no talks with the Sputnik manufacturer to integrate this vaccine in our portfolio.”

Frustration at Germany’s vaccine rollout has seen support plunge for chancellor Angela Merkel’s ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU).

Dr Merkel is moving ahead with plans to centralise lockdown restrictions as fears of losing power hang over a weekend gathering of CDU/CSU Bundestag MPs. The meeting will hear the two parties’ respective leaders make their final pitch to lead the alliance election campaign.

‘Geopolitical blinkers’

CSU leader Markus Söder, minister president in Bavaria, is seen as having better chances; his officials deny his Sputnik V announcement had anything to do with further political ambitions.

Bavarian officials said the deal, also dependent on EMA approval, could see the state get priority delivery of the vaccine produced in a plant in Illertissen, located midway between Munich and Stuttgart.

In January Hungary issued a national licence for Sputnik V and began a rollout in February. Last week Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz said he was days away from signing an agreement for up to one million Sputnik doses by June. While Austria’s health minister Rudolf Anschober indicated he would prefer to wait for the EMA to approve “effective and safe” vaccines, Mr Kurz said a pandemic was no time for “geopolitical blinkers”.

A week on, appetites are cooling in Vienna at news that in neighbouring Bratislava, some 200,000 doses of vaccine delivered from Russia in February are still waiting in refrigerators.

A secret procurement deal by Slovakia’s prime minister Igor Matovic triggered a government crisis and prompted his resignation.

Slovakian health authorities say they are waiting for further data from the producers of the vaccine, after initial tests showed the substance differed from that which received favourable peer-review feedback last February in the Lancet medical journal.

Curevac

The European Medicines Agency (EMA) is studying data on the Russian vaccine, with a decision on a permit not likely before June.

In Germany, Tübingen-based company Curevac announced on Thursday that it had entered the final stage of its medical trials and hoped for EMA approval in the third quarter.

CureVac chief executive Franz-Werner Haas said that, with recruitment completed for the vaccine’s phase 3 clinical trial, approval could come soon after through an expedited regulatory approval process.

“We are expecting that, according to our calculations, towards the end of April or beginning of May that we will have the data,” Dr Haas. “Based on data, of course, we expect to be given approval at the beginning of June.”

With orders for more than 450 million doses in Europe alone, the German company is already mass-producing the vaccine, which uses similar mRNA technology to the BioNTech product.