EU leaders are to hold a pandemic video summit on 21 January after the bloc said it had reached a deal with Pfizer and BioNTech for 300m more doses of their Covid-19 vaccine, giving the EU nearly half the firms’ global output for 2021.
The move raised hopes for speedier inoculation across the continent as the European regulator, which this week approved the Moderna shot, said it would authorise six doses from each vial of the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine, increasing available jabs by 20%.
The Pfizer/BioNTech Covid jab is an mRNA vaccine. Essentially, mRNA is a molecule used by living cells to turn the gene sequences in DNA into the proteins that are the building blocks of all their fundamental structures. A segment of DNA gets copied (“transcribed”) into a piece of mRNA, which in turn gets “read” by the cell’s tools for synthesising proteins.
