The European Union will donate 200 million more COVID-19 vaccines to the world, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said during her annual State of the European Union speech.
Von der Leyen said that deliveries would be made by the middle of 2022 and that they would come on top of the 250 million vaccine doses already committed for donation.
“Our first and most urgent priority is to speed up global vaccination,” she said in her speech. She called the discrepancy in vaccination between the developed and developing world “one of the great geopolitical issues.”
Brussels has come under fire for only having shipped a small percentage of the total doses it has committed so far.
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