The European Commission (EC) signed a contract with the pharmaceutical company Gilead to receive doses of Remdesivir, a drug that has shown efficacy in the face of the Covid-19, enough to treat 30,000 critically ill patients in the 27 States of the European Union (EU) and the United Kingdom.

The community Executive, signed on Tuesday the contract with the company and will begin distributing starting from August the lots of Veklury, the commercial name of the Remdesivir, between the countries, reported this Wednesday the Commission.

Stella Kyriakides, commissioner for Health and Food Safety, has declared: “In recent weeks, the Commission has been working tirelessly with Gilead in order to reach an agreement guaranteeing delivery to the EU stock of the first authorized treatment against the Covid-19. Less than a month after the authorization of the remdesivir, a contract was signed that will allow the delivery of treatments for thousands of patients since the beginning of August. The Commission is doing everything in its power to ensure access to safe and effective treatments, and to support the development of vaccines against the coronavirus. The agreement reached is another important step forward in our fight to overcome this disease”

Brussels will pay 63 million euros for the treatment, which will be funded through the Instrument of Emergency Support put in place by the Covid-19, which has 2,700 million euros from the community budget to fund the purchase of treatments or vaccines, for example.

The Remdesivir acquired will allow the treatment of “approximately 30,000 patients with severe symptoms of the Covid-19” and will help to meet the immediate needs in the coming months, the Commission said in a statement.

Brussels assures that it will also allow a “fair” distribution between the States, to be carried out according to a distribution key based on the recommendation of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.

At the same time, Brussels is preparing a public tender process jointly in order to acquire this medicine to cater to the needs from October onwards.

This substance is subject to conditional approval, an approval that is used in cases of emergency, so that the EU will continue to monitor that the treatment is safe and has requested that Gilead submit their final reports to the European medicines Agency before December 2020, in order to receive final authorization.

The united states already had secured at the beginning of July, the purchase of more than 500,000 treatments Remdesivir of Gilead to the american hospitals until September, equivalent to 100% of the production of the pharmaceutical in July and 90 % in August and September.

The Remdesivir can be used to treat adults or adolescents over 12 years of age suffering from pneumonia and need to receive extra oxygen. It is an experimental therapy that began to develop in 2009 and was tested with patients of ebola in the mid of the last decade.

A clinical trial u.s. has shown that it shortens the recovery time in some patients patients with the coronavirus.