FILE PHOTO: Boxes of the Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine are pictured in a refrigerator at a NHS mass coronavirus vaccination centre at Robertson House in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, Britain January 11, 2021. Joe Giddens/Pool via REUTERS
LONDON — Hundreds of thousands of doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine have been flown to Australia from the United Kingdom but the source of the shipments was kept quiet to avoid any controversy in the United Kingdom, The Sydney Morning Herald reported.
The first 300,000 UK-made doses landed at Sydney Airport on February 28 – one month after the European Commission introduced new curbs limiting the export of vaccines produced on the continent, the newspaper said.
Another large batch arrived on an Emirates passenger plane in March, well after Italy and the European Commission formally blocked an application by AstraZeneca to ship 250,000 doses to Australia, the newspaper said.
The newspaper cited an unidentified British official as saying that the shipments to Australia were never at the expense of the UK’s vaccine rollout — one of the swiftest in the world.