Hacker News Reader

Comment by boringg | Hacker News Reader

Seems short sighted to me given we don't know efficacy against the variants. If I were in the contractual chair I'd keep all my options on the table, we aren't out of this yet.

assuming this is true, as opposed to some kind of way to leverage better terms out of a deal

View on HN

If I were the chair I'd be looking at how can I subsidize more mRNA production (the whole supply chain, lipids might be a better focus than mRNA itself) so that if variants are a problem we can get more vaccine fast. This will also scale to the net pandemic. This seems to be something close to what they are doing.

Right now adenovirus based vaccines as a rule seem like they need to go back to the lab for a few years.

I would keep options open to other vaccine technologies. There are others out there with some promise. I wouldn't expand on them yet - they haven't delivered, but I'd keep options open and would be ready to change if the real world conditions change.

The EU have options to buy 100 million doses of AZ vaccine for 2022, but they need to make up their minds now if they want them or not. With AZ's history of not delivering on time I think this is a no-brainer, especially since we don't know if the AZ vaccine will work on the new Covid variants. Why pour more money down the AZ drain when we have better alternatives?

Because it’s a very small amount of money relative to the impact of the pandemic. Even if these vaccines only added 1% to the fight against the pandemic they’d be worth it. This is another expression of the “penny wise, pound foolish” decision-making process that led to the EU being last in lines for the vaccines in the first place.

It's the cost centric/money spent only mentality that pervades the minds of many. Agree completely with you.

It is a no-brainer to spend this money.

Someone in the world is going to have a use for these vaccines, buy them and then give them away if you don't need them in the end but in the meantime just book more supply. 18 months from now if the world is flushing COVID-19 vaccines down toilets due to surpluses every dollar will have been worth spending, the downsides are too great.

The problem is that this option is to buy AZ's current vaccine that have a high probability of being ineffective in 18 months. EU is not saying that it won't buy from AZ, but as of now it's not well spent money to buy their current one to be delivered in 18 months. By then all companies will have new better vaccines and the EU would have to fork up a shitload of money on the new AZ vaccine and just write the old of as another loss while the AZ execs get another fat bonus paid by the EU citizens.

Isn't AZ selling the vaccine at cost? Won't AZ also have the opportunity to improve their vaccine (or delivery protocol)? Won't more data be available in one year with which to make these decisions?

Regardless of the margins involved, I think it is improbable that AZ would want to produce an obsolete vaccine when those facilities could be producing a better one if they have something ready to go. Its not like everyone involved here is a sociopath, they can put the money down now and renegotiate for a mutually beneficial change to the contract.

> The problem is that this option is to buy AZ's current vaccine that have a high probability of being ineffective in 18 months.

I doubt that is a "high probability" occurrence.

If it does occur and AZ makes a lot of money, I don't care. The EU has many shitloads of money to spend, spread out your bets, go to town, reward every vaccine producer with huge profits, that's what we want, we want all of the companies that bet big on developing products - successful or unsuccessful - to make money off this thing. That way if it happens again they won't be shy about giving it another go!

The EU was slow off the mark when it came to ordering vaccines and as a result it did not get priority for deliveries. The EU can't change that now, but it can send the manufacturers a message warning of the dangers of not showing fealty.

Perhaps I'm cynical, but I do wonder if this decision is more politics than science.

I think people are possibly reading a bit more into this than necessary. Stripped of context "supplier A delivers ~33% of contracted quantity of thing, other suppliers deliver 100% or more of contracted quantity of thing, supplier A's contract not renewed" is not even a vaguely surprising narrative, even if 'thing' is entirely generic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com