Hundreds of thousands of doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine have been flown from the United Kingdom to Australia but the source of the shipments was kept quiet to avoid any controversy in coronavirus-ravaged Britain.
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. 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.
