AstraZeneca has agreed to lower prescription drug costs for Medicaid under a deal with the Trump administration.

AstraZeneca said it intends to seek U.S. approval for its COVID-19 vaccine later this year, further delaying the application even as the company announced it had already delivered more than 1 billion doses to other countries.

European Council President Charles Michel, top of screen, takes part in an EU Summit, via videoconference link, at the European Council building in Brussels, Thursday, Feb. 25, 2021. The leaders also said that restrictions, including on travel, should remain in place in many parts of the 27-nation bloc. The EU has partly blamed supply delays for lagging far behind nations like Israel, the United States and Britain when it comes to vaccinations. By early this week, 6.5% of the adults living in the EU had been vaccinated, compared to more than 27% in the U.K. He also raised concern about other issues, like the exclusion of those who have not been vaccinated, or cannot be.

The EU has asked AstraZeneca for permission to release the contract, Kyriakides said. The EU’s drug regulator will consider the AstraZeneca vaccine on Friday. “This is this is really, really bad news — not only bad news for the European countries involved,'' he said. Soriot said AstraZeneca had to reduce deliveries to the EU because plants in Europe had lower than expected yields from the biological process used to produce the vaccine. “There are a lot of emotions running in this process right now, and I can understand it: people want vaccine,” Soriot said.

“We, as the EU, must be able to know whether and what vaccines are being exported from the EU,” German Health Minister Jens Spahn said. The EU has committed to buying 300 million AstraZeneca doses with option on 100 million extra shots. The AstraZeneca vaccine is already being used in Britain and has been approved for emergency use by half a dozen countries, including India, Pakistan, Argentina and Mexico. AstraZeneca's announcement that it will deliver fewer vaccines to the EU early on has only increased pressure on the bloc, especially since Pfizer-BioNTech, the first vaccine to get EU approval, failed last week to keep up its promised deliveries to the EU. Pfizer has temporarily reduced vaccine deliveries to the EU and Canada as it revamps its plant in Belgium to increase overall production.

AstraZeneca chief executive Pascal Soriot also told the Sunday Times that researchers developing its vaccine have figured out a “winning formula” making the jab as effective as rival candidates. Partial results suggest that the AstraZeneca shot is about 70% effective for preventing illness from coronavirus infection, compared to the 95% efficacy reported by Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech. Asked about the vaccine’s efficacy against the new variant of coronavirus spreading in the U.K., Soriot said: “So far, we think the vaccine should remain effective. But we can’t be sure, so we’re going to test that.”British authorities have blamed the new virus variant for soaring infection rates across the country. Public health officials said on Dec. 24 that more than 600,000 people had received the first of two doses of the Pfizer vaccine.

“We have aligned the timing of delivery of vials to the timing of the clinical trial readout,’’ Soriot told analysts on a conference call. AstraZeneca and Oxford have pledged to provide their COVID-19 vaccine on a non-profit basis during the pandemic. Kate Bingham, chair of Britain’s Vaccine Taskforce, says data on the two most advanced vaccine candidates — AstraZeneca-Oxford and Pfizer’s collaboration with BioNTech — should be available in early December. AstraZeneca is building frozen stockpiles of the vaccine’s active component, which will be turned into the injectable vaccine as soon as the clinical data comes through. “As soon as you turn this vaccine into vials, the shelf life starts ticking.’’___Follow AP’s coronavirus pandemic coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/virus-outbreak and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak.

Ultimately, the public will have to trust regulators around the world and the independent experts that oversee drug trials, Soriot said during a panel discussion sponsored by the World Economic Forum. But public health experts have expressed concern that political pressure on regulators to quickly approve vaccines will undermine public confidence in their safety and effectiveness. Against this backdrop, drugmakers have come under pressure to release more incremental information on the progress of their vaccine trials - information that they normally wouldn’t release until the trials are complete. AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson and two other companies recently released the detailed protocols for their vaccine trials. “Because if you disclose … too much information you can actually compromise the clinical trial itself.”___Follow AP’s pandemic coverage at http://apnews.com/VirusOutbreak and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak

LONDON Pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca repeated its promise not to profit from a COVID-19 vaccine during the pandemic as it reported it was on track with late-stage trials for the treatment. Such promises were boosted by strong sales across its range of treatments during lockdown. Despite the good earnings, CEO Pascal Soriot said he remained cautious amid the uncertainty of the pandemic. AstraZeneca has struck a number of deals around the world to supply the experimental COVID-19 vaccine, which has shown promise in early testing. We want to cover the whole world,'' Soriot said, so everyone can get access to this vaccine.''