The European Commission will on Wednesday approve yet another contract to pre-order 160 million doses of a COVID-19 vaccine from the US biotech company Moderna, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced on Tuesday.

“I am happy to announce that tomorrow we will approve a new contract to secure another COVID-19 vaccine in our vaccine portfolio,” von der Leyen told a press conference in Brussels.

This is the sixth contract the Commission will sign with pharmaceutical companies for the purchase of a COVID-19 vaccine.

Von der Leyen said that the EU was working on another contract as well, stressing that the EU would have the largest vaccine portfolio in the world. She added that the vaccines would be made available after undergoing thorough checks by the European Medicines Agency.

The Commission president said that a vaccine was the most effective way to stop the pandemic and that therefore the priority was to get vaccines quickly. Another priority was to to make sure that the vaccines were available to everyone in the world, she added.

Von der Leyen noted that the EU had already made a great contribution to securing a sufficient number of doses of vaccines for poor countries.

The Moderna company announced last week that based on results from the final stage of clinical trials its experimental vaccine was 94.5 percent effective against COVID-19.