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Comment by DoingIsLearning | Hacker News Reader

The official statement from AstraZeneca's CEO is that they have a fully operational production in the UK and are still resolving production issues in the EU sites.

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.

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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?

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.

Source?

https://www.itv.com/news/2021-01-26/covid-vaccine-what-is-th...

That source needs sources.

the dated letter from the member states health ministers to the commission "asking" it to take over the negotiatons has been floating around the internet

And it is a bad contract at that.

It's specifically stated in the contract that the UK facilities are covered. It's literally written in plain English, like you can read it from the document(the black markings on the white background). The continental facilities not getting online is irrelevant.

We can agree that indeed this should be demanded.

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?

AFAIK this is not correct, they negotiated on stuff like liability. Not price.

For 3 whole months though? This isn't a 20 year down the line trade agreement it's a medical emergency.

I don't think that it has anything to do with deliveries. They were not shipping vaccines when EU was negotiating the liability stuff. Instead, they put it on the contract that both UK and EU facilities are to be used and no other contracts to prevent EU's deliveries.

Would "best reasonable efforts" generally include breaking of stronger worded contacts signed earlier? The UK contract was more along the lines of "you can partner with Oxford to get their IP and we'll help set up production lines on the condition we get first refusal of vaccines from those lines"

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