Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel and France's President Emmanuel Macron put on a united front as they supported the European Union's vaccination roll-out approach, emphasizing cooperation across the bloc.

The EU has been criticized for the way it was slow off the mark to distribute vaccines and has lagged other countries.

"I fully support the European approach," Macron said on Friday. "What would people say if countries like France and Germany were competing with each other on vaccines?"

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The comments were made during a joint news conference during which Merkel said that although the sluggish roll-out had shown the bloc needed to ramp up pharmaceutical production capacities, "the basic decision to order together as the European Union was and is right."

Merkel has taken to the airwaves several times this week to defend Germany's decision not to go it alone.

She said the EU and vaccine makers were "working as fast as possible" to accelerate vaccinations and expand production lines.

The EU has ordered more than enough potential vaccines for its 450 million citizens, she said, but the initial shortages have laid bare that the bloc's "production capacities are not as large as we had imagined."

She added: "But producing vaccines is not something that can be done from one day to the next. These are complicated processes."

Olaf Scholz, Germany's vice-chancellor and finance minister, reportedly criticized European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen during a German cabinet meeting this week. He asked Merkel what was going on in Brussels, according to German daily newspaper Bild.

Macron said the bloc had secured doses from a wide range of vaccine candidates, but admitted leaders had been caught off-guard by the swift success of experimental mRNA vaccines.

The jabs, based on novel technology never before used in a commercial vaccine, were developed by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna and became the first two shots to be approved by EU regulators in the fight against the pandemic.

"Nobody could have known that we were going to have safe vaccines so quickly," Macron told reporters.