The European Commission has renewed a contract with pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and BioNTech to purchase an additional 300 million doses of their vaccine against the coronavirus disease, President Ursula von der Leyen said on Friday.“As you know, we have right now access to 300 million doses of the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine.

“Now the good news is, we now have agreed with BioNTech/Pfizer to extend this contract.

“With the new agreement, we could purchase a total of up to an additional 300 million doses of the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine,” von der Leyen said at a briefing.She added that 75 million of those new vaccines would be available in the second quarter of the year, with the rest arriving in the third and fourth ones. (Sputnik/NAN)