Export? USA and UK bought those vaccines a year ago from Pfizer, Moderna, J&J and AstraZeneca. Warp Speed, USA gambled and the world is better because of it.
They are contracts and dates on which x million doses are to be delivered by. Why didn't EU do the same? Crying now it's too late and a trade war can go both ways. Say, no vaccine would be produced unless a certain item that is produced in USA goes to a Belgium factory.
The USA negociated more slowly than the EU. The UK signed a research deal before the EU but didn't order until a week later.
The only difference is that the EU remained truthful to the free market while both the USA and the UK put country first closes.
> Crying now it's too late and a trade war can go both ways.
There are no trade wars. Both the USA and the UK have shown themselves to be extremely unreliable partners which will not respect the rules they profess to believe in as soon as it doesn't favor them. That was already obvious with Trump and is only more obvious now.
I fully expect the USA to lose its place as the main global power in the next decade if not sooner. The UK will probably pay the price a lot sooner as the EU is not going to forget and they have no other reliable ally.
The US signed their AZ deal months before the EU and UK. They threw billions of dollars at every company they could find, readily paying high rates while other countries tried to negotiate lower ones. So I'm really not sure where this idea of yours comes from.
The fact is that EU is too slow, too risk adverse and 28 countries must agree. In USA the President winks, and it's done. (In this case it was beneficial.)
> The fact is that EU is too slow, too risk adverse and 28 countries must agree.
Not strictly true, as for these purposes the UK was still bound by EU rules until Jan 1st this year and did its own thing for the vaccinations without breaking those rules.
The EU nations generally like to work together and negotiate as one, as doing so saves money; money was the wrong thing to optimise for in this case.
> The EU nations generally like to work together and negotiate as one, as doing so saves money; money was the wrong thing to optimise for in this case.
Right. Probably should have optimized for human life. Hindsight is 20/20.
Optimizing for human life would have meant spending a potentially unlimited amount of money. Maybe a few EU countries would be happy with that trade off, but the poorer countries wouldn't have been able to afford it.
The EU was in the difficult position, as either the eurosceptics in the poor countries would complain that the EU was throwing them to the wolves, or the eurosceptics in the rich countries would complain that they were having to subsidise the poor countries who refused to pay the full amount.
When faced with a global pandemic, vaccinating just your own country while your neighbours become a breeding ground for new variants isn't really solving the problem, especially if your neighbours are closely integrated with you and citizens have freedom of movement across borders. This is why we can't have nice things.
Nah, I think this is a case of hindsight 20/20 — If they’d optimised for reaching a decision quickly rather than cost, that would’ve been better. Not the only mistake by the EU nations despite the lower average death count/capita than the UK, but certainly an embarrassing one.
I'm not sure that optimising for "reaching a decision quickly" is really a valid strategy here. To do that, you'd basically turn the first rule of improv into a constitutional principle and always say "Yes" to any binary decision.
If what you mean is "reaching the correct decision quickly" then that sounds like it's begging the question, because correctness is subjective and it has to be optimised relative to certain other criteria than just speed.
I agree with you, though, that it is definitely worth looking at death count per capita (of different jurisdictions) and compare that with the costs of vaccination programs and lockdowns. Those won't be easy calculations to make, but after keeping epidemiologists and economists busy for the rest of the decade we may eventually learn some fascinating lessons from all this.
This way of looking at things ignores the astonishing cost of maintaining emergency support payments to people and businesses, which are significantly more expensive than the price differential on vaccines. Ireland's spending over a million euro per hour on that and will now be forced to do so for thousands of additional hours.
I’m not claiming they were successful in lowering costs, just that their approach fits the hypothesis that that was their intent. “Penny wise, pound foolish” as the saying in my home country goes.
How did the UK govt (not the private Swedish-British company AstraZeneca) show itself to be an unreliable partner? Be as specific as possible.
I want to get your view and if I think it’s valid, I want to pass it onto my MP, to put democratic pressure for the UK to maintain its status of a rules-based society.
There are trade wars, and there will continue to be.
> Both the USA and the UK have shown themselves to be extremely unreliable partners which will not respect the rules they profess to believe in as soon as it doesn't favor them.
That's rich coming from the folks responsible for GDPR. You pollute our web, and then cry about things that don't favor you? Boo-hoo.
So did many other countries. The US is getting those doses faster by preventing the Pfizer factories in the US from exporting any doses, so they have no choice but to sell all of that supply to the US. That's why Canada is getting all of the Pfizer/BioNTech doses it purchased from the Belgium factory rather than one right across the border in the US.
Far from firm? If I sign a contract to buy apples from you 6 months from now, but you show up with apple seeds, was my order not firm if I don't pay you?
The fact is when Pfizer showed up with a vaccine, they knew they could sell $2 billion to the US and would have legal recourse if the US government didn't pay. That's as firm as it gets.
The participants in operation warp speed get paid whether or not their vaccine makes it through trials.
To use your analogy, farmers can sign contracts for "all the apples that's produced this year" if they want to offload the risk of crop failure rather than a contract for a specific number of apples.
A `firm order` is a business term to mean an order which is non-cancelable. It would be correct to say Pfizer was only tangentially connected to Warp Speed as Warp Speed money was used to place the firm order of $2 billion doses with Pfizer.
Pfizer knew for a fact, even if COVID was miraculously cured, or it turned out there was a super cheap treatment, or anything that made their vaccine worthless, they could still sell $2 billion units to the US.
The EU did the same and they were also the ones funding the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine.
But I agree with your other comment about the US. The EU should have done the same. Restrict all exports to other countries until x million is delivered domestically.
The EU did sign contracts. Unfortunately AstraZeneca is not going to be able to fulfill the contract, only delivering 30m out of 80m doses in Q1, with an even bigger shortfall expected for Q2.
True, the EU even waived its right to sue because delivery delays.
"And as POLITICO reported last week, the non-redacted version of the contract shows that the EU also waived its right to sue AstraZeneca in the event of delivery delays."
Again: No, the UK had a binding contract with AZ since May already.
"However, the key lies in an earlier agreement that AstraZeneca made back in May with the U.K., which was a binding deal establishing “the development of a dedicated supply chain for the U.K.,” an AstraZeneca spokesperson said."
No, I've already posted the article that states that the UK signed the contract with AZ in May. There are also other news articles from May 2020 (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/18/coronavirus-astrazeneca-aims...) that prove that the UK already ordered back then.
That's why it was considered "news" when it was reported that one particular contract was signed by the UK one day after the EU. But that's not the full story, since the UK had binding contracts with AZ well before that.
"The link also says they wouldn't export EU manufactured vaccines, except Italy blocked an export to Australia a couple of weeks ago."
I haven't seen that claim in the article you linked.
"He also denied suggestions that AstraZeneca might be selling vaccine doses manufactured in the EU to other parts of the world in order to make a bigger profit."
It is well known that AZ sells the vaccine at cost. E.g. "... is being offered by the drugmaker at cost during the pandemic and at no profit in perpetuity for low-income countries." [1] That's because the vaccine was developed by the Oxford university and Oxford made this a condition. If AZ makes a profit from the vaccine during the pandemic they would break the contract with Oxford.
It seems the cost price differs from country to country because of different production costs and other factors (maybe shipping).
That article was clearly published in May 2020, I don't assume AZ sneaked that article in. Are you really saying that AZ was faking the press release in May 2020, so that in 2021 they could claim that the UK signed the contract three months before the EU?
Your article from may doesn't say anything about signing contracts, only that they are ready to go.
I've seen the articles mention may, june and august as signing dates of the contract, so clearly there is some 'miscommunication'. And both the may and june date originates from AZ, while the actual date turns out to be august.
There are plenty of articles from May 2020 that all discuss in various words that a deal was struck. If you believe that AZ didn't sign a contract with the UK before Aug 28 then the burden is on you to prove that.
No, there are plenty of articles from which you deduced there was a contract signed by the UK before august.
It's impossible to prove there wasn't a contract signed, it is however possible to prove a contract was signed. Your articles never provided evidence for the date the contract was signed.
what's the point of a contract that's not enforceable? if EU has to resort to export bans after the fact, sounds like someone somewhere didn't do basic due diligence. companies aren't going to deliver just out of the goodness of their hearts.
> what's the point of a contract that's not enforceable?
That's why the USA didn't bother ordering rapidely. They knew they could use the defense act and executive orders to block exports and they did as soon as they could. Even Canada is buying vaccines in Belgium.
The UK was wise. They prevented Oxford associating with Merks and forced them to partner with AstraZeneca. That's the key take away from the pfizer debacle and the Nordstream interferences. Europe needs to strike American companies hard and push them out of the European market as fast as possible. The USA is not our ally.
That’s absurd. On the contrary, we should work closer with our ally USA, increase trade and more cooperation. We should completely decouple from China and stop trade from there, and restart domestic manufacturing.
To do that, we would need to trust the USA to have our shared best interest in mind. I don't have that. The EU is notoriously bad in protecting their self-interest, the US is notoriously good at that.
I want to the EU to be a close ally to the US, but it is not the EU who is the problem here.
Doesn't Germany have a lot of manufacturing? I thought it was what they were known for.
China's final assembly companies are not the only kind of manufacturing and not the most worthwhile part of it, although Shenzhen is certainly good at electronics.
The EU also hadn't approved the vaccine when those stockpiles were exported, and it was to compensate for UK domestic production shortfalls which the EU suffered from a few months later due in large part to the Commission delaying the contract. The UK got precedence because they were first in line and the EU couldn't yet use the vaccines.
The majority of these doses will be Pfizer, as there's no production in the UK and the UK's MHRA reported ~10m people had a first Pfizer dose by end of Feb
Everyone I know (me included) is currently being given AZ vaccine and I presume the Pfizer is being retained for second shots for those who've already had it.
Of course there's politics in play, as well as the challenges of scaling up vaccine production but IMV biggest thing Britain could do is give enough Ireland enough doses to speedup the vaccination of their population
I honestly think no one wanted to sign with the Trump admin. Remember, when the vaccines were being developed and worked on everyone was complaining about Trump rushing the vaccines and how they weren't going to be safe nor effective. If the EU signed on early they would be giving approval to Trump before the results were in.
They are contracts and dates on which x million doses are to be delivered by. Why didn't EU do the same? Crying now it's too late and a trade war can go both ways. Say, no vaccine would be produced unless a certain item that is produced in USA goes to a Belgium factory.