By Le Figaro with AFP
Sweden announced on Thursday that it was participating in an EU-wide agreement with the Swedish-British pharmaceutical group AstraZeneca to secure its supply of vaccines against Covid-19.
In mid-June, Germany, France, the Netherlands and Italy negotiated an agreement with AstraZeneca on behalf of the European Union, guaranteeing the supply of 300 million doses of a possible vaccine against the coronavirus. By joining the deal, Sweden, which has a population of 10.3 million, would get around six million vaccines initially – two million in a second. “We are negotiating with everyone to secure” the supply of potential vaccines, Richard Bergström, Sweden’s national vaccine coordinator, explained at a press conference.
A vaccine hoped for by “the end of the year”
At the end of July, AstraZeneca had said it hoped to deliver the vaccine it is developing with the University of Oxford (United Kingdom) by “at the end of the year”. Sweden, which hit the headlines internationally for its more flexible approach to the Covid-19 pandemic, on Thursday recorded 85,810 cases of contamination and 5,805 deaths.
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