EU leaders are to hold virtual talks to discuss ways of boosting Covid vaccine supplies and improving the rollout of doses across the 27-nation bloc.
The European Commission will on Thursday ask leaders to support plans for added controls on vaccine exports, which could affect supply to the UK.
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson earlier warned against imposing “blockades”.
The virtual summit comes as a third wave of coronavirus infections sweeps across much of mainland Europe.
US President Joe Biden will also dial in to the talks later on Thursday to discuss EU-US relations.
The tougher export controls are most likely to affect vaccine-exporting countries than have higher vaccination rates than the EU, such as the UK and US.
The key criteria for the proposed regulations are “reciprocity” and “proportionality”.
The EU’s Internal Market Commissioner Thiery Breton insisted the bloc’s issues were with AstraZeneca and not the UK government. “I know that there’s some tension… but as long as we have transparency, I think [relations] will be able to be normalised,” said Breton.
He added that if AstraZeneca had provided the agreed 120-million doses to the EU, member states would have been at the same rate of vaccination as the UK: “We have been heavily penalised and we just want to understand why”.
