Isn't it obvious that the "best effort" is not fulfilled if you you manage to produce 6 hamburgers to UK and one to EU when you specifically said in the contract that your facilities in the EU and UK are to be used?
From his explanation the EU signed their contract with a 3 month delay from the UK contract. Arguing that he is being accused of EU production issues on sites that have not had the 3 month lead time that the UK sites had to resolve any production issues.
You can argue that the UK production output could potentially be distributed proportionally for worldwide demand but to me the real question is why isn't anyone in the media or in the European Commission asking questions on why did it take 3 months to draft such a bland generic urgent supply contract?
I am sure the truth is probably somewhere in between but to me it seems the EC is playing the media game and trying to through AstraZeneca under a bus to cover for their own ineptitude in such a clutch time.
It's worse than that. The contract they finally signed was an almost carbon copy of one prepared by Germany, Netherlands and Italy 3 months earlier, before the EU stepped in to take over and "expedite" matters.
However, I ask again, why is no media outlet questioning our representatives about why they burned 3 months of people dying, to then come up with essentially the same terms as the unilateral contracts that the Dutch and the French were initially drafting?
This isn't a contract to squeeze the best deal out of AZN, it is an emergency purchase, what was there to negotiate?