The European Commission has announced a series of measures to deal with new variants of Covid-19. It includes a faster process for approving modifications to existing vaccines to combat emerging variants and more oversight of vaccine manufacturing capacity within the EU, including financial support to unblock bottlenecks to supply.
The moves are part of a process to set up a permanent 'Biodefence' agency in the EU, to look out for future threats from viruses and other biological hazards, and have the capacity to search for and scale up production of vaccines and therapies.
In the wake of the recent row with drugmaker AstraZeneca over its inability to supply vaccines the EU has contracted for, which spilled over into a dispute with the UK