EU to spend billions of euros to secure coronavirus vaccine

The EU plans to pump billions of euros into advance purchase deals with pharmaceutical companies for potential coronavirus vaccines, in a sign of intensifying rich country efforts to secure supplies of any future treatment. The bloc’s health ministers on Friday gave political backing to a European Commission plan to use a “large majority” of a €2.7bn emergency fund for the effort and to ensure fair access to any remedy worldwide. The move highlights the urgency of European efforts to escape a pandemic that has hit the populations and economies of many of its countries hard. It may also stoke fears that poorer countries will be squeezed out of vaccine purchases by the financial muscle of the world’s biggest economies.