LETTER: Referring to NST Leader of March 24 titled "Stop supply supremacy", allow me to share some facts.
You accuse the European Union of hoarding vaccines. The fact is that by March 25, the EU had authorised for exports more than 77 million doses, and Malaysia has been one of the many recipients.
At the same time, 71.9 million doses had been delivered in the EU, while our total population is about 450 million, so we still need many million vaccines for our own populations. This is solidarity, the opposite of hoarding.
The objective of the mechanism is not to restrict or ban exports. Since its introduction on Jan 30, a total of 380 requests for exports have been authorised and only one has been refused. Our aim is to make sure that Europe gets its due share of vaccines and we invite other countries to open up for exports too.
European citizens do not understand why vaccines manufactured in the EU are going to other countries, but close to nothing is coming back.
In fact, until now, every single request for export of vaccines to Malaysia from the EU has been approved. Moreover, as is well known, the vaccine delivered from the EU to Malaysia is the BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine, which has a very high efficacy.
It was developed, authorised and brought to the market less than a year after the pandemic began, a record for a new vaccine, and shortly after exports to Malaysia began.
This could not have happened without the company in Germany that developed it, without the remarkable Hungarian researcher who has worked on mRNA research all of her professional life or without the facility in Belgium that produced it.
This is not to mention the financial support from the EU and its member states for vaccine development and production, which has been in the order of RM13 billion. The EU has not "hoarded jabs for themselves", but advanced billions to develop vaccines in the hope they would work, and always with the aim to share them with third countries, including Malaysia.
The EU's solidarity does not end there. We have already exported vaccines to 33 countries outside the EU. The EU is the number one and main exporter of Covid-19-related vaccines in the world.
The President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, who is also a medical doctor, said on March 24: "The EU is proud to be the home of vaccine producers who not only deliver to EU citizens but also export across the globe.
"While our member states are facing the third wave of the pandemic and not every company is delivering on its contract, the EU is the only major OECD producer that continues to export vaccines at large scale to dozens of countries."
And the EU is not just investing in vaccines only for Europe. EU Member States can donate vaccines to vulnerable countries, and that is already happening. As to the UN's Covax scheme, the EU and its member states have already provided 2.2 billion euros (RM10.5 billion) of the 5.2 billion euros (RM25 billion) pledged in support of delivering at least 1.3 billion doses for lower-income countries by the end of this year.
Every single day, lives in Malaysia and around the globe are saved because of a quality vaccine exported from the EU. Every single day lives in the EU and around the globe are saved because of high-grade PPE exported from Malaysia. This is the real story.
What is needed to overcome this pandemic is solidarity and cooperation. The EU and Malaysia are doing our parts with our different but crucial contributions to help the world conquer this pandemic.
MICHALIS ROKAS
Ambassador of the European Union to Malaysia
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the New Straits Times