Europe Trails the USA's Coronavirus Vaccine Purchases

The European Commission (EC) announced on August 13, 2020, that it has concluded exploratory talks with Johnson & Johnson (J&J) to purchase a potential vaccine against COVID-19 being produced by Janssen Pharmaceutical research teams. The EC said it anticipates that once the J&J Ad26.COV2-S preventive vaccine candidate has proven to be safe and effective, the EC would have a contractual framework in place for the initial purchase of 200 million doses on behalf of all Member States, and could further purchase up to an additional 200 million vaccine doses from J&J.

These 400 million vaccine doses trail the U.S. government's aggregated purchase commitments which have reached about 800 million, as of August 12, 2020.