Comment by IMTDb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by IMTDb | Hacker News Reader

The EU was super happy on the negociations on the vaccine prices with AstraZeneca. They claimed that the grouped buy was a major reason why they were able to get such a cheap price (Around $2.15 / dose). The US and UK pays around $3 to $4 / dose.

To compare, South Africa seems to be paying $5.25 to AstraZeneca. Pfizer vaccine costs $14.70/dose and Moderna $18. You can see why the EU is so dependent on AstraZeneca. It's all about injecting the cheapest vaccine as fast as possible.

Basically, the EU got a super heavy discount on the vaccine price. This also mean that they are last on the line for deliveries. In times of hardship, any sensible business will satisfy clients who pay a significant premium for their product before delivering the noisy client that negociates super harshly and can't stop complaining about your product.

Ursula von der Leyen needs to look herself in the mirror for the supposed "vaccine delivery issues". She willingly looked for the cheapest provider. When you imperatively need a product to be delivered and to work, you pay a premium for it, you don't look to reduce your costs as much as possible.

They did still pay 370M eur to them upfront + 660M eur in grants for R&D through Horizon 2020. 1B eur client can afford to be a bit noisy.

All in all AZ vaccine is not that significant for the EU anyway - so far the administered doses were about 80% Pfizer. And if you look at the at-risk population (65+) it's probably even higher

I don't know how important it was in big scheme of things, but saving money on the dose cost was the silliest thing I've ever heard. I've spent more money on tortilla chips this week than they saved on the doses. I would gladly pay $100/dose out of pocket for a vaccine at this point. I'm not sure if the dose cost made any difference in how fast the vaccines got made, but any time spent trying to get the cost down below the US and UK rates was wasted.

Isn't AZ forced into a non-profit scheme by the IP agreement with the University of Oxford?

I would love to hear more about this ? Any source on it ?

https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2020-11-23-oxford-university-break... (it is towards the end)

Thanks for being faster!

> The suggestion we sell to other countries to make more money is not right because we make no profit everywhere.That's the approach we took and we agreed on that. That’s the agreement we have with Oxford University. It's actually even written in a contract we have with Oxford University: that we will be at no profit. We have slightly different prices from one geographic to the other because the cost of goods may be different. We have a supply chain in Brazil, we have another one in Latin America, another one in South Asia. We have one in Japan. Of course, you know, local costs are different. So you've got slight variations, but more or less, it's about three to four dollars, more or less everywhere.

This was an interview with the AZ CEO when the EU delays first kicked off: https://www.repubblica.it/cronaca/2021/01/26/news/interview_...

The core difference for the EU contract was that the EU wouldn't accept any/as-much liability for any harm caused by the vaccine (compared with UK/USA). Not sure the source of this claim.

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