PRAGUE (Reuters) – The Czech Republic has declined an offer to buy AstraZeneca Plc’s coronavirus vaccines from an intermediary in the United Arab Emirates, Czech officials said on Wednesday.
Health Minister Jan Blatny said the offer was not officially from the UAE but that it came from an unnamed third party.
“An offer arrived from this country from an intermediary, for a purchase from India,” he said on Twitter.
“It concerned a batch that does not have a permission for the European Union,” he said.
An AstraZeneca representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In India, AstraZeneca has licensed the Serum Institute of India (SII), the world’s largest vaccine maker, to manufacture the shot mainly for poor and middle-income countries. A spokesman for SII was not immediately reachable for comment.
The number of infections, hospitalised patients and deaths in the Czech Republic, a country of 10.7 million, has spiked in recent days. The country ranks among the worst-hit places in the world.
The government deployed more police officers and soldiers on Monday to help enforce new lockdown measures that seek to confine people mostly to their home districts.
Prime Minister Andrej Babis said in parliament last month that he and three other prime ministers in Europe had been offered AstraZeneca shots by a Dubai intermediary but he did not consider the offer to be reliable.
(Reporting by Robert Muller and Jan Lopatka in Prague; Additional reporting by Alistair Smout in London and Euan Rocha in Mumbai; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
