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Comment by mhandley | Hacker News Reader

This article misses the important piece of information that AstraZeneca is producing this vaccine at cost. They're already taking a large financial risk up front by scaling up production in advance for a vaccine that may not pass stage 3 trials, so may not be approved for use. They will make no profit from it, so you cannot really expect them to also accept liability. These are unusual times, and they require unusual approaches.

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What this english article also misses is that the Belgian government becomes liable for the damages. This was discussed in the local press.

Anyways, if the fine print of the contract indeed stipulates that they will sell it at cost, then I see no problem with it. The problem is that I doubt this is the case otherwise they could give up their patent and let countries produce the "generic" version. In return they will be refunded for their research and can keep their know-how.

> What this english article also misses is that the Belgian government becomes liable for the damages. This was discussed in the local press.

How does that work when there is no government, as in Belgium ?

We do have a govt, it's just the elected parties that can't agree on how to govern together so in the meantime there's some interim setup. Or something along those lines. It's such a non issue that nobody even notices. I wonder if anyone at all is impacted.

Yes, we're living in an advanced democracy. The country doesn't grind to a halt when there's a political disagreement.

You are using two different meanings of “government”, one refers to the machinery of state and one to the regular political leadership of that machinery endowed with certain powers by virtue of meeting certain procedural rules. The first is where the liability lies and is not interrupted, the second is interrupted as a result of no leadership currently meeting the procedural standards, but not critical to the issue at hand.

This vaccine is the Oxford vaccine. It has been licensed at no charge to India, Russia and Argentina/Mexico and Australia to produce their own vaccines. They all agreed to sell at manufacturing cost. Around $3-4/dose to manufacture.

I am curious about this claim.

Someone else in another post a few weeks ago that large pharmaceutical companies take in a ton of funding from investors and governments around the world during research. If it doesn't ends up being successful, they're fine.

However if you're a small time actor or startup, it's pretty much win or die that you have as options as the same lucrative funding isn't available.

This vaccine was developed by Oxford University. AstraZeneca stepped in to produce it rapidly. They don't normally produce vaccines at all, but they do have very capable production facilities and people. In this case they committed to ramp up production several months in advance of the stage 2/3 results, because production ramp-up takes a long time and we really need a vaccine quickly. Yes, seems odd for big pharma to commit production resources with no prospect of big returns, but that's what they've done. Probably some of those production facilities were running under capacity anyway, as cancer treatments, etc have been postponed this year. I guess if it works, it will at least be a huge PR win, especially for their CEO who's gone out on a limb to make this happen.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-52917118

And it’s not just them either. The Serum Institute, the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer (based in India), is taking huge risk both manufacturing at cost and scaling up manufacturing of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine ahead of trial completion: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/01/world/asia/coronavirus-va...

Would you care to share your source? Thanks.

https://www.astrazeneca.com/media-centre/press-releases/2020...

If you're looking for different articles from other sources (as opposed to this press release), you can find quite a few more by going to your favorite search engine and trying a query like "astrazeneca vaccine cost"

> They will make no profit from it, so you cannot really expect them to also accept liability.

Wow. "Companies should only accept liability if they make profit" is a very bleak view of the world.

If a company faces liability for something on which they can't recoup a profit, they will tend not to do that thing at all, as it would be per se irrational. That's the point the commenter is making.

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