News Desk
Angela Merkel came under fire on Monday after it emerged she intervened personally to block a bid by European health ministers to secure larger orders of the Coronavirus vaccine over the summer. Public anger is growing across the continent at the European Union’s failure to order enough doses of the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine which was developed in Germany and manufactured in Belgium. But it now appears Mrs Merkel blocked an initiative by the German, French, Italian and Dutch health ministers to order more stocks of vaccine last summer. Bild newspaper published a leaked letter from the four health ministers to Ursula von der Leyen in which they agreed to drop the initiative and hand over control of vaccine orders to the European Commission.
