The European Commission stressed that the report from the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control suggests that variants from China are already circulating in the EU.
The European Commission has offered China vaccines against COVID-19 to stop the wave of coronavirus infections in the Asian giant, although the Chinese authorities have not yet responded to this offer.
“In light of the situation in China, Commissioner (Stella) Kyriakides contacted her Chinese counterparts to offer EU solidarity and support, this includes expertise in public health and also donations of variant-adapted EU vaccines.” , explained a community spokesman at a press conference.
The community Executive avoided specifying how this donation would take place, but pointed out that these issues “will flow” depending on Beijing’s response to the offer, which has not yet been received by the community authorities.
“Our offer is to help and cover needs with experience, information exchange, vaccines and everything that may be necessary to contain the wave of contamination in China. It depends on China’s needs,” the spokesman explained.
The European Commission also did not want to evaluate the quality of the data on covid infections by China, although it emphasized that “transparency is very important to manage a pandemic” and recalled that the WHO is the body to analyze this type of matter.
Chinese Variants Circulate in Europe
At the European level, Brussels stressed that the report published this Tuesday by the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) indicates that the variants from China are already circulating in the EU, so they “do not present new challenges” in the bloc given the European “high general population immunity rate”.
In any case, the spokesman recalled that this Tuesday afternoon there will be a meeting of health experts from the Member States that “will resume discussions to have a coordinated EU approach” regarding the increase in infections in China.
Although he has preferred not to speculate on the conclusions of said meeting, he affirmed that the objective is to evaluate the “epidemiological situation” and establish a “common position” on the measures to be adopted “with a view to the meeting, a day later, of the Response group Integrated Crisis Policy (IPCR), in which, in addition to the countries of the bloc, community institutions and other experts participate.
In recent days, the European Commission has repeatedly said that “coordination” is needed between Member States on national measures in the face of the emergency of coronavirus infections in China, which have led different countries (including Spain) to reestablish controls covid for travelers from the asian country.
This article is originally published on rpp.pe
