BRUSSELS -- As the European Union surpassed 500,000 people lost to the virus, the EU Commission chief said Wednesday that the bloc's much-criticized vaccine rollout could be partly blamed on the EU being overly optimistic, overly confident and plainly "late."
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen defended the EU's overall approach of trying to beat the pandemic with a unified vaccination plan for its 27 nations, even if she admitted mistakes in the strategy to quickly obtain sufficient vaccines for its 447 million citizens.
"We are still not where we want to be. We were late to authorize. We were too optimistic when it came to massive production and perhaps we were too confident that, what we ordered, would actually be delivered on time," von der Leyen told the EU parliament.
On the vaccine authorization, which left the EU three weeks behind Britain in starting its vaccination campaign, von der Leyen promised action. She said the EU would start a clinical trial network and adapt the approval process to get doses quicker from the labs into the arms of a needy population.
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"It's is true there are also lessons to be drawn from the procedure we have followed. And we are already drawing them," she told legislators.
The European Medicines Agency has approved three coronavirus vaccines for the bloc so far -- from Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and Oxford-AstraZeneca -- and is reviewing others.
Despite weeks of stinging criticism as the EU's vaccination campaign failed to gain momentum compared with Britain, Israel and the United States, the main parties in the legislature stuck with von der Leyen's approach of moving forward with all member states together.
"The key decisions were right," said Manfred Weber, the leader of the Christian Democrat European People's Party.
The Socialists and Democrats party leader Iratxe Garcia said "Fiasco, catastrophe, disaster: they ring very true to our citizens," but added her party will stick with von der Leyen on the bloc moving together. "Criticism is necessary but with a constructive spirit."
Von der Leyen's assessment was made as the bloc's death toll passed a landmark of 500,000, a stunning statistic in less than a year that fundamentally challenges the bloc's vaunted welfare standards and health care capabilities.
The bloc has been fighting off the remnants of a second surge of the coronavirus that has kept nations from Portugal to Finland under all kinds of lockdowns, curfews and restrictions as authorities race to vaccinate as many people as possible.
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Meanwhile, South Africa will start vaccinating front-line health workers next week with a shot that is still in testing -- an unorthodox strategy announced Wednesday after officials abandoned plans to use another vaccine that a small study suggests is only minimally effective against the variant dominant in the country.
Health Minister Zweli Mkhize said South Africa would switch to the Johnson & Johnson vaccine and, at least for now, not use Oxford-AstraZeneca's -- which has been heralded as one of the most promising for the developing world because it's cheaper and does not require freezer storage like some other leading vaccines.
The world is watching South Africa's vaccination strategy intently since there are increasing concerns that new variants -- not just the one first detected there -- might evade vaccines, making it harder to end the pandemic. The variant now dominant in South Africa is more contagious, experts say, and it recently drove a devastating resurgence of cases.
A small study that suggested the AstraZeneca vaccine was poor at preventing mild to moderate disease caused by that variant threw the country's vaccination campaign into disarray this week just as it was about to start. Experts say the vaccine -- the only one authorized for general use in South Africa -- may still prevent severe disease.
But officials quickly turned their focus to the one-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine -- which has been approved only for use in studies in South Africa and, in fact, hasn't yet been authorized for general use in any country. The company has applied for emergency-use permission from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and South Africa's regulatory authority.
Information for this article was contributed by Andrew Meldrum, Mogomotsi Magome, Gerald Imray, Danica Kirka and Jamey Keaten of The Associated Press.
