Nonsense. This isn’t really about countries exporting/not exporting. These vaccine deals are with private companies who produce their product around the world. Just because vaccines are manufactured in a specific country doesn’t make them property of that country.
Whichever country is contractually at the front of the line will have their order fulfilled first/according to the terms of the contracts.
The EU wasted months negotiating lower prices and then took longer with approvals.
There is no good guy or bad guy (at least until the UK or EU blocks exports preventing execution of the private contracts - at that point the country blocking the exports becomes the bad guy).
> Nonsense. This isn’t really about countries exporting/not exporting. These vaccine deals are with private companies who produce their product around the world. Just because vaccines are manufactured in a specific country doesn’t make them property of that country.
The US used the national defense production act to block any export of BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine produced in the US to other countries, so no, this is not just "These vaccine deals are with private companies who produce their product around the world." - countries can and do influence these deals if it benefits them. UK did the same thing.
Don’t conflate the ability to negotiate carefully with banning exports. The private company AZ signed a contract with the British govt according to which they can export once they have delivered the agreed doses to the U.K. the faster they deliver on their commitments, the faster they can start exporting. No one forced them to sign the deal and no one in the UK is banning exports of the vaccine.
This is hair splitting, because the effect is exactly the same. The UK made sure not to export any vaccines until it has more than enough. This is exactly what the the US is doing, even if they use technically slightly different means.
Having a preferential contract with a single supplier is not remotely the same as imposing export controls on every supplier within a territory. The EU is and always has been allowed to source vaccines from the UK and the fact it voluntarily chose not to does not mean it was 'effectively' banned from doing so. The British government spent months and tens of millions of pounds setting up the AZ supply chain while the EU were haggling over its contract. It's not then unreasonable for the British government to require that it has priority on the supply it was instrumental in creating.
You just confirmed my point. The EU -in contrast to the US and the UK- did not want any exclusivity. They wanted collaboration and a fair distribution of vaccines. They negotiated on a EU level exactly to avoid any nationalistic competition. I am not saying that the US/UK strategy is bad in any objective way. I am just saying that it is the same strategy.
By "fair" do you mean EU countries favoured over the rest of the world? How much have the EU exported? They only house 6% of the world's population, but are keeping something like 75% for themselves, no?
And how much would be the EU's "fair" share of vaccine manufactured in the UK? As they seem to be expecting far more than that 25% for themselves, from their retoric they wanted it "evenly" distributed, i.e. massively in their favour, directly from Ms Von der Leyen's mouth:
“That is the message to AstraZeneca, ‘You fulfil your contract with Europe before you start delivering to other countries’.”
There's nothing "fair" about the EU's distribution of the vaccine, claiming otherwise shows complete naivety or bare faced lying.
Don't conflate Merck with Merck. There's two "Merck", one is Merck KGaA, which is a German company, and the other one is Merck & Co. Inc., which is the US company. These are independent entities today, they just share a common history by originally being a German company, of which the US company was splitted off during WW1.
The Oxford/Merck deal would have been with Merck KGaA, as far as I know. The US government would have had no means to apply export bans to a German-based company.
I have no knowledge beyond what I just heard from you.
That sounded implausible. The country which had the ability to negotiate that happened to be the same country where the doses were manufactured? Why couldn't the UK apply its careful negotiating skills elsewhere too?
Alternative hypothesis: the credible implicit or explicit threats of a ban were what enabled the deal. "Sign this or else."
The UK government provided a lot of the money to AZ to build out the local vaccine supply chain and factories. Those factories most likely wouldn't exist unless the UK government had paid that money. So, as part of paying for all that, they asked for timed exclusively.
Also remember the vaccine was developed by Oxford using a significant amount of UK government funding, and was licensed to other countries, such as India, for low cost manufacturing.
We did also buy a lot of vaccine from other places (e.g. Pfizer which is also being widely deployed). But with AZ in particular (and to some extent Novavax) there was a focus on building a local supply chain so that countries can't play games with our vaccine supply. Supposedly Pfizer turned down the offer to build UK based factories.
- The vaccine is mainly funded by Oxford University and AstraZeneca (AZ) . The UK Government also provided £65.5m.
- Most of the AZ vaccine for the UK is being made in the UK. AZ have said none of their vaccines have been sent from the EU to the UK.
- AstraZeneca said its agreement with the EU allowed the option of supplying Europe from UK sites, but only once the UK had sufficient supplies (due to the contract the UK negotiated) .
- A drop in confidence in the AZ vaccine means there are lots of unused vaccines. France and Germany have used only about half of the AstraZeneca jabs they have received, according to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC).
- 10 million Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines have been exported from the EU to the UK.
Are there really a lot of unused vaccines in Europe though? What are the equivalent numbers for other countries? I submit it's a supply chain thing, there's a week's worth of vaccines moving from the factory to the humans
No there are not. Those are second doses. In EU they 'reserved' second doses. UK for example went on to vaccinate as much as possible. That's why there will be a delay now of a month or two.
Unfortunately the drop in consumer trust has been enormous. [0] And humans lose trust faster than they regain it.
After the wild "let us suspend AZ and let us restart it in two days" ride, it will be much harder to get AZ into arms of European patients. Even here in the Czech Republic, where AZ wasn't suspended, the reverbations in the public are stark and all kinds of half-baked conspiracies started circulating. (An example: "Germans want to get rid of a junk vaccine and force it on us Slavic untermenschen, while they will only use more expensive and better Pfizer for themselves.")
(a) Consumer confidence wasn't high in the first place
(b) This wasn't without reason. AZ has significantly more severe side effects and is less effective.
(c) That said, I'd certainly still take it, it is highly effective at preventing the worst outcomes.
(d) That said, the whole "consumer confidence" narrative is a canard. Its effects don't come anywhere near the effect of the delivery shortfalls. It's so totally ridiculous that it does make me wonder where it is coming from.
How much did they fund before the initial order? I can't seem to find a source. All the results just talk about their down payment not the initial funding like the UKs £65m. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/56483766
Another hypothesis: Oxford was originally going to partner with Merck [1] but there were no supply guarantees in that contract. AstraZeneca was willing to give guarantees and run production in the UK, so the UK government leaned on Oxford and had them partner with the more agreeable supplier.
I don’t know why you presuppose the U.K. is where it would have had to be manufactured. Manufacture in the U.K. appears to have been made to happen at the insistence and investment of the U.K. government, from my recollection of a thread by an Oxford researcher involved.
There appears to be a similar deal with Novavax to setup similar domestic capacity in the UK for its vaccine.
Even if the UK was threatening AZ with an export ban, they didn’t force AZ to accept those terms. AZ could have just said no and made the U.K. government look incompetent and unleashed media scrutiny on BoJo.
Yes, having the industrial base is part of the attraction of the UK for pharmaceutical companies. As is having a skilled workforce and a reliable system of laws.
I’m rejecting your original point about the U.S. and U.K. doing the same thing, which they aren’t.
Well, the motivation and effect is exactly the same which is what most people care about in the end. It's a nationalistic move which is what makes your day if you're a nationalist.
This is not what the contract says. The contract says there is no other contract that would prevent them fulfilling the EU contract. Since the contract makes no promises about delivery schedule it’s pretty clear the U.K. contract does not prevent its fulfilment, as the U.K. contract can only delay it.
However the EU contract seems to insist the initial 300M doses are made within the EU itself, and the EU has its own dedicated supply chain regardless that can eventually deliver, so this also seems to exclude conflict with the U.K. contract.
>"The US used the national defense production act to block any export of BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine produced in the US to other countries"
This is false. The DPA was invoked in order to a) block the export of certain raw materials in order to prioritise local production of vaccines and b) to compel drugmaker Merck to help produce its competitor Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine.[1] It does not block the export of vaccines. The White House clarified this last week as well.
The US government purchased those. They own those doses and so they are not AstraZenca's to sell.
From your own nytimes link:
>"Last May, the Trump administration pledged up to $1.2 billion to AstraZeneca to finance the development and manufacturing of its vaccine, which it developed with the University of Oxford, and to supply the United States with 300 million doses if it proved effective."
AstraZenca is free to export any vaccine beyond their contractual obligation of those doses. Jane Psaki confirmed as much in her WH press conference on Thursday.
That’s not been demonstrated. It has been claimed that a separate supply chain was initially purchased for the U.K. within the EU. No evidence has been presented that AZ doses from EU supply chain were diverted.
Only for one clause of the contract. There's a requirement that all vaccines supplied under the contract are sourced from within the EU, with some provision for AstraZeneca to source from elsewhere under exceptional circumstances, and it says the UK is treated as part of the EU for the purpose of that clause and only that one. The part requiring them to set up an EU supply chain and make a best effort to supply the EU with a certain number of doses on a certain schedule does not include the UK. Like, someone went to actual effort to ensure it didn't apply to that part of the contract (and I wouldn't be surprised if it came from the EU side).
Yep, the contract between the EU and AZ explicitly states that the UK shall be treated for most purposes (manufacturing site and so on) as an EU member. The UK is not included in the EU orders so.
>Whichever country is contractually at the front of the line will have their order fulfilled first/according to the terms of the contracts.
Tell that to Canada. They were securing doses from day one and still suffered from delayed shipments and now have to contend with countries of manufacture forbidding export. What really pisses me off is that the US Gov had 30 million doses of Astra for several months and it it isn't even approved for use. Why hoard it when you can save lives in other countries while you have no intention of using it soon if ever? Sure they might get their approval in May or June but by then I expect the other manufacturers to have ramped up to cover everyone everywhere.
My understanding is that the manufacturer of the vaccine didn't apply for emergency approval- they are letting it go through a longer process by their own choice.
There might be perfectly valid reasons for this- I am not sure to what extent the government could or would want to force it to fast-track.
The manufacturer didn't apply for EUA because the European trial was a mess, and there was basically no chance of FDA approval based on the data they had.
The FDA is already reluctant to use trials from jurisdictions that may be very different demographically. When the trials are marginal, confused, and confounded, the chance of a FDA approval become negligible.
If the AZ US trial pops out good data, you can expect a speedy EUA application.
Probably the same reason why the manufacturer hasn't requested EU approval of the Dutch plant where they manufacture vaccines exported to the UK. That is, to make more money.
Canada put all their eggs in the CanSino vaccine even though they knew they had a bad relationship with China. This summer China conveniently blocked all progress and Canada was left scrambling. Blame Trudeau not the US.
“ Early last year, Canada also signed an agreement with Chinese vaccine-maker CanSino for a vaccine trial, but that deal fell apart. CanSino had initially agreed to bring its vaccine candidate to Canada for testing.Critics have accused the federal government of failing to move swiftly to secure agreements with the likes of Pfizer and Moderna because it was focused on that failed deal.”
My sister is a pharmacist in Toronto. She is personally vaccinating people right now as we speak. She said as of last week Ontario only had 200,000 Astra Zeneca vaccine doses allocated to it until April. 200,000 for 15 million people. She says that maybe Ontario may get more on Friday via the US sending more AZ but there’s no information about anything else. Until a few days ago, AZ could not be given to anyone over 64 which caused a lot of confusion and anger. And then Ford said in a conference that they were letting people get the AZ vaccine but they didn’t let the pharmacies know ahead of time, causing even more confusion.
My mom who is in her 80s, her second dose of Pfizer was just recently pushed out by 4 months because they don’t have enough supply. My aunt who is in her 70s couldn’t register (until recently as I mentioned) for a shot because they didn’t have any supply for her age range.
So no, Canada doesn’t have the doses it needs. It’s last in line because they started negotiating months after every other country and only after CanSino deal crumbled.
Canada signed deals with Pfizer and Moderna on August 5th. The EU signed a Pfizer + Biontech deal on September 9th. The US signed a Pfizer + Biontech deal on July 22nd.
And yet, Canada is substantially behind the EU on receiving doses, despite putting an order in more than a month earlier.
Given that the US only came to the agreement two weeks before Canada, I don't think Trudeau was sitting on his hands, waiting months for the CanSino deal to fall apart, before exploring alternative options. Seems to be a bit of an exaggeration by the Tories.
I don’t think this is true? I recall an infographie from before vaccines had been deployed anywhere which showed where all of the countries were sourcing their vaccines from, in what quantities, etc, and I believe Canada was buying all sorts of vaccines so they would have much redundancy in case problems arose with any of them.
You are lying. Canada has ordered 7 times the amount of population. From different manufacturers. You’re making things up.
Biggest problem of Canada? There’s no local manufacture. And yes you can blame the liberals for that. Your anti Chinese talking point is not based in facts.
The deals closed after the CanSino deal fell through. Canada didn't sit around, waiting for it to fall through, before negotiating the others. Securing multiple sources of vaccine from independent providers was always the government's plan.
But because the first of those four deals fell through (and because the countries manufacturing vaccines bought in other deals are prioritizing their domestic markets), politicians of all party affiliations now have an excuse to grouse.
>"What really pisses me off is that the US Gov had 30 million doses of Astra for several months and it it isn't even approved for use."
The drugmaker must apply for emergency use authorization before it can't be approved in the first place. They still have not applied for EUA as of today.
The time-wasting meme is a lie from the UK Government. The UK contract was signed after the EU contract. They posted the contract by accident which was picked up on in some of the press. It also had the same clauses as the EU.
On the other hand the UK still has a fully nationalised health service which means that it was in a much better position to be able to scale the vaccinations. That's probably the real reason that they're ahead.
Give it another 10 years of Tory rule and they'll "catch down" to the rest of the world.
This is a misunderstanding, as incidentally is the claim that the UK contract was signed three months earlier, because in both cases there is the assumption that there is "a" contract and no money flowed or contractual obligations were created before then. The reality is that in both cases, memoranda of understanding, investment agreements, and all sorts of other documents also exist and in some cases were signed earlier. In particular, there were agreements first with Oxford and then with AZ to start scaling capacity very early and even before the notional purchase contract signature in May (that's the one that was later superseded at the same time as the final EU contract was signed).
So it is simultaneously true that they signed a contract within a few days of each other, but also not quite the full picture.
The original claim regarding the EU dragging its feet over signing the contract was made by the AstraZeneca CEO, not the UK government. And the UK's contract is not entirely the same as the EU's. For example, the EU waived its right to sue AstraZeneca for delivery failures, something the UK did not. This article by Politico does a good job of going beyond the rather reductive coverage (both pro-UK and pro-EU) in most of the press coverage of this affair, and digging more deeply into the facts:
The conclusion, at least as I interpret it, is that both the UK and the EU can reasonably claim to have priority, based on their respective contracts, but that the UK did a better job than the EU in making theirs enforceable. Hence, AstraZeneca has prioritised them, while the EU has been forced to resort to political rather than legal measures to attempt redress (publishing the contract, export controls, etc.). And the UK's closer ties to the AstraZeneca vaccine project likely did mean they started work on the UK supply chain somewhat earlier than in the EU, even although the final contracts were signed essentially simultaneously (one day apart).
I honestly don't really see this as an affair with clear good guys and bad guys, but it seems like most people are determined to do so, and inevitably along the lines of their pre-existing sympathies.
Part of the issue, and this is something that both AZ and the EC fucked up in their contract negotiations is not thinking about this contingency. "Best reasonable efforts" is pretty clear... if you only have one customer.
If you have multiple customers, who signed slightly different contracts at different times, and who also have different side agreements regarding specific facilities they may have paid for in part or in whole, you really need to define how you make allocation decisions in case of shortfall so that everyone understands their risk exposure.
I will personally hold the EC responsible because although AZ has also messed up by not negotiating a clearer contract, it is the EC that indirectly works for me and it is their job to think about this on my and my family's behalf. Had they understood the consequences of being so far back in the production queue much earlier they could have spent more on upgrading production but it is not clear to me that they even understood this until January. While I'm sure that they are trying their best, and bad luck with Sanofi plays a part here as well (as does the incompetence of e.g. the Dutch government in managing distribution), I am pretty unimpressed with how they have dropped the ball here.
It's not good them saying, "oh AZ isn't producing as much as they thought they would". Ok, cool story bro but they're making a novel biological, so you should have anticipated this and done more to prepare plans B, C, all the way through F. Not just placed a few commercial orders and then hope it all works out.
But if the contract states there are no competing customers, and talks about 4 different sites, I'd say most bases should have been covered.
Az then turning around, and using three of these sites exclusively for UK production (since it was 'first') kinda defeats that.
Then there is indeed a difference in contract law, where the UK is far more focused on the letter of the contract, while European law is more about 'what could have been done'.
In the middle of a pandemic there isn't much we can do against pharmaceuticals. In the mean while has Az delivered more than Moderna until now.
So, we should take what we can. Only thing we could blame the EC on is that we should not have based our strategy of vaccinating out on such an unreliable, inexperienced partner with a complicated biological process.
Looking back and keeping the Pfizer vaccin European would have been less naive, but we would have started these vaccins wars.
Will be interesting what the long term consequences are of having UK and US vaccinated two months sooner.
I don't think Europe will forget this.
But if the contract states there are no competing customers, and talks about 4 different sites, I'd say most bases should have been covered.
But does the AZ-EU Advance Purchase Agreement[1], which is the somewhat redacted document that was published, talk about 4 different sites? I haven't found anything about specific sites so far, nor any guarantee that there are no competing customers. Have I missed something?
In section 5.1, it does state that AZ shall use its BREs to manufacturer the Initial European Doses within the EU. Then in section 5.4, it states that AZ shall use its BREs to manufacture the Vaccine at manufacturing sites located within the EU, and that specifically for section 5.4 only, that includes the UK. If the exception proves the rule, those sections together appear to imply that AZ must try to manufacture those initial batches for the EU within the EU not including the UK, and then any subsequent manufacture can be done in either the EU or UK (and otherwise there are some additional provisions about other possibilities). Maybe a lawyer can comment on the choice of language there, but it seems awkwardly written to me.
It does not say there is no competing contract, it says no contract would prevent fulfilment of its contract. The EU contract stipulates that the delivery schedule is only an estimate, so another contract that was estimated to permit that delivery schedule would not conflict. It also seems to stipulate that the initial 300M doses will be manufactured within the EU, but this is incidental to this claim.
I think the underlying problem is that there is just not any real cooperation on global vaccine distribution. Certainly the details about the enforceability of the various contracts wouldn't matter if the customers all talk between themselves and agree on what would be acceptable modifications of the delivery schedule.
In the event, it seems neither Boris nor Biden seem very interested in considering anyone else before they've scored enough points at home, and meanwhile real international cooperation on vaccine deliveries is dead. Oh well, hope not all trade follows that pattern shrug.
Sources? I've heard the "EU signed before UK" multiple times now, but nobody ever links to a source. It just seems unlikely, no? Why would they be so catastrophically far behind in that case?
Similarly - the NHS is great, but not unique. Norway for example has a system akin to the NHS (and so do many EU countries) and there's no correlation there. Norway is waaaaay behind the UK and the US. Again, it seems unlikely that the NHS is the cause.
It's obvious you hate the Tories, but that shouldn't cloud your judgment to such a degree that you fail to celebrate the real achievement of the UK's vaccination rate.
It's my impression that the vaccination program in Denmark is very efficient just like in the UK. However, the speed is limited by the vaccine imports which are governed by deals made by the EU. I would think that Norway is similarly limited by imports. (They are not in the EU so probably are making deals at a national level.)
Individual member states can approve their own vaccines. Look at Hungary. Italy wants to use and manufacture the Russian vaccine, but the EMA hasn’t approved it yet. Why not?
> the Russian vaccine, but the EMA hasn’t approved it yet. Why not?
Because nobody applied for approval for the longest time. It was just a few weeks ago that a German company decided to apply for this approval. Now the wheels of assessment are turning.
The EU “time-wasting meme” comes from a direct quote from the AZ CEO.
According to Dominic Cummings recent select committee hearing, the vaccine programme was largely built outside/adjacent to any existing NHS processes. It was given NHS branding for public trust reasons (just like the new-from-the-ground-up Track and Trace endeavour).
The vaccination rollout programme is very much NHS. Vaccination is something the NHS does. So that shouldn’t be surprising.
Believe Cummings point was that The Department of Health wasn’t in control as it is in terms of test and trace. So NHS + Cabinet office (and not DHSC’s normal red tape, funding models) = success.
However, I think “sources” in the vaccination task force have said Cummings is full of it.
Administering each vaccine seems to be 100% NHS. While it is quite likely that Cummings is full of it, he did specifically mention that the vaccine task force works outside of the Department of Health.
“That is why we had to take the vaccine process out of the Department of Health.”
Cummings is a self-serving apparatchik with an eye to his future reputation so of course he’s trying to claim he was involved in the one successful program initiated by the government. I’m not sure why you give his claims any credence given his proven lies elsewhere.
I’m no fan of his and ad hominem arguments don’t help anyone. Considering the lack of transparency across the whole vaccine programme, I think the fact he made the point several times without being called out (in a committee hearing designed to call out any BS) is quite pertinent.
He lied to the public, repeatedly, in a very obvious way. He was also in that segment being fed softball questions by Aaron Bell, Conservative MP which were probably arranged in advance.
I therefore don't in any way trust his self-assessment of his own department's work and the 'vaccine task force' he set up, which incidentally hired some of his associates, who were paid very well, for example the PR firm:
A director of the public relations firm paid £670,000 to advise the head of the UK government's coronavirus vaccine task force is a longstanding business associate of Dominic Cummings.
Gosh, that article is incredibly revealing of some serious cronyism going on. It does also, however, confirm that the task force was operating outside of the DoH as per the original point.
If you trust what he says about who did what. If you don't, it could mean it operated outside the DoH but actually did very little in the procurement process.
> On the other hand the UK still has a fully nationalised health service which means that it was in a much better position to be able to scale the vaccinations. That's probably the real reason that they're ahead.
EU doesn't have problems with vaccination but with supply of vaccines, we use up all we can get (at least until AZ issues, now people are afraid to vaccinate with it).
There are many (all?) countries in EU that have health service nationalised in EU. The only country I know that doesn't is US.
Public Health care =/= nationalized health service
e.g. germany is holding up a ton of vaccines for the second shot right now, so no, we are not using everything we have. Supply is one thing, distribution is another. And the EU has trouble sorting out the latter, a problem that will hurt even when supply increases to a point were there will be more doses than needed around June/July.
I'm genuinely curious what's the difference between public and nationalized health service?
Nationalized for me means that something is owned by state (and for me it is the same as public).
(You are right I forgot about second dozes, but I think that's a good thing considering manufacturers are not supplying us on schedule - and some stupid countries - like mine - use up all vaccines and hope that there will be a second doze in 6 weeks).
Sure it’s private companies but it wasn’t random chance that led to AstraZeneca (a British–Swedish company) working with the Oxford group in the U.K. or Pfizer (an American company) with BioNTech. It’s a lot easier to control production when it happens within your borders (eg Trump did have some executive order banning exports but this was just symbolic when the defence production act was invoked.)
The current bottleneck in the Pfizer vaccine production is the last manufacturing stage — combining the mRNA with lipid nanoparticles. There are currently two plants for it, one in the US and one in Belgium. The US plant only delivers to the USA, the Belgian to the rest of the world.
What I would like to know is why did we not use the year we had to build out local manufacturing capability? Given the gravity and cost of the pandemic surely we could have thrown a few billion at it and done a conflict-style mobilisation to get manufacturing capacity far above what is needed as a redundancy measure.
2. Everyone's just blindly hoping that we won't have to repeat the quarantine-wait-a-year-and-a-half-for-vaccines for the inevitable tide of COVID-19 variants, that will be evolving in the world's unvaccinated populations.
Look, the people who should have been sorting out vaccines were running around like headless chickens trying to deal with a global pandemic.
Nobody has experience with this, and pretty much all Western governments thought they were done post June 2020, which clearly wasn't the case.
They focused on other things (and there were lots of other things to focus on), and it's caused massive problems now.
I completely agree that we should have built more manufacturing, but we didn't know which vaccines would work at the time.
To be honest, the only people who could have actually made this happen was the US Federal Government in 2020, and they were focused on different things.
Your expectations of the people we trust to manage society for us are way too low. Maybe this is part of the problem with the rot of western civilisation. We’ve let our standards slip to pitiful levels. If I could foresee this a year ago sitting at home on my sofa with practically zero experience they could too. It is their job to and lack of specific experience doesn’t excuse the lack of application of basic and universal risk mitigation strategies. It doesn’t matter which vaccines would prove to work or not. You ramp up manufacturing capabilities and tooling on the 10 most likely candidates. It’s called hedging and the whole world knows about this strategy for a long time. No epidemiologist thought it would be over in June 2020. All the messaging was and is 2 years at least.
Or your expectations are too high?
Like, this has never happened before, we dodged sars, mers and swine flu so absolutely nobody was prepared.
And have you offered to supply your government with all your vast supply chain knowledge? This stuff is complicated, and one link in the chain failing reduces all capacity.
To be fair, they did try (to a certain extent). The reason that we have as many vaccines as we do is because the US, UK & EU poured money into all of the vaccine efforts.
I'm also super disappointed at the lack of ambition, to be honest (every human should be vaccinated by EOY if we actually want this to be done), but given my experience running much smaller scale logistics, I'm amazed we've done as well as we have.
As I note above, the US Feds could definitely have done better, as could the EU, but there's a sense of deference to private providers which I find unwarranted, and which could be the cause of the slowness.
I also don’t understand why we need to negotiate with the private sector at all. This is a crisis. Set a fair price. Mandate an open license, open up manufacturing to anyone and everyone who can do it and just start doing it. Regarding supply chain difficulties we can also throw money at that. For sure there are people and companies who can solve each individual problem if given the resources. Right now we don’t have the luxury of efficiency we just need to get it done.
I don't know what other countries did but the UK did start doing this.
There was lots of talk about cronyism when Kate Bingham was appointed to run the vaccine task force but taking bets and investing early even when outcomes weren't know is one thing the UK seems to have done well in the last year
BioNtech has entered into an alliance[1] with 13 European companies to boost the vaccine production, as well as Chinese Fosun Pharma[2]. The agreement with Pfizer was important for the initial trials and production launch of the vaccine, but it's not binding and BioNtech is free to license the vaccine to other manufacturers (most likely under a different brand name from Comirnaty).
Also, BioNTech has partnered with German Evonik[3] and Merck[4] to accelerate vital lipids production by the second half of 2021.
They (BioNTech) themselves have only a few in Germany (2 or 3), but it's produced by other companies for them now as well totalling to around seven according to this German source: https://www.pharma-food.de/markt/standorte-corona-impfstoff-.... I say around because not all do the whole production sometimes only parts of it as it seems. Didn't dig very deep into it.
> President Trump first invoked the DPA in late March 2020 in response to the coronavirus pandemic...limiting the export of medical goods, increasing domestic production of masks and ventilators
> Accordingly, I find that health and medical resources needed to respond to the spread of COVID-19, including personal protective equipment and ventilators, meet the criteria specified in section 101(b) of the Act (50 U.S.C. 4511(b)).
Note that this is the executive order for allowing the Secretary of Health and Human Services to do things...
> (c) The Secretary of Health and Human Services shall issue such orders and adopt and revise appropriate rules and regulations as may be necessary to implement this order.
It wasn't specifically saying "you, company, make this."
> President Donald Trump on Thursday invoked the Defense Production Act to push 3M and six major medical device companies to produce protective masks and ventilators needed for the coronavirus outbreak, bowing to weeks of pressure to expand the federal government’s use of the emergency statute.
> President Donald Trump will use the Defense Production Act to compel an unnamed company to produce 20 million more coronavirus testing swabs every month — weeks after labs and public health officials started warning that shortages of these swabs were hurting efforts to ramp up testing nationwide
> These acquisitions will fulfill a large-volume purchase of diagnostic systems and assays for COVID-19 testing and will expedite shipments of these systems and assays to every nursing home certified by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid services (CMS) with a Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendment (CLIA) Certificate of Waiver – approximately 14,000 nursing homes – in the United States.
> Trump raised the specter of invoking the Defense Production Act -- which allows the president to require companies to prioritize contracts deemed essential for national security -- if the U.S. struggles to obtain the vaccine for its citizens.
> “If we have any problems, we will be instituting the Defense Production Act and make sure we don’t have any problems,” he said.
I'd argue that in a time of crisis, the EU government is being negligent if it's not forcing domestic production capacity to prioritize output for domestic use.
If it nationalized the factories, or seized supply it hadn't ordered, I might consider it the bad guy. But irrespective of who gets the vaccines first, the EU has already bought the some portion of the supply.
> I'd argue that in a time of crisis, the EU government is being negligent if it's not forcing domestic production capacity to prioritize output for domestic use.
I understand that viewpoint but feel like the long term consequences politically would be too high. We live in a globalised world where most of the richest countries do little of their own manufacturing. If we start blocking exports in times of crisis the foundations of that system would be damaged.
Yes, but wrt nationalization, that was more a statement of where I would draw the line if I had to choose whether the EU was being a good/bad actor rather than the EU's actual capacity as an organization.
I would argye that the EU merits government status, given the degree to which it dictates standards in the eurozone. Even though it is fairly weak, and lacks enforcement capacity on its own, my understanding is that the EU as a body has the capacity to set standards for the block as a whole, restricting export of certain goods like the vaccine for example. I could be wrong, though?
The original comment, and this retort, sums up the argument in a nutshell. I see both sides of this one, offered both of these arguments to a friend last night. It's complicated, like most of these things.
Damn I hate saying this... but, to be fair to the pharma corps... ugh, I feel sick for saying that... manufacturing vaccines isn't like making plastic cups and straws. I'm in no way qualified to explain pharmaceutical production, but I highly doubt it's that simple to just Thanos snap produce these things. Equipment, QC, materials, whatever, it takes time. This on top of still having to produce all the other drugs we need to keep their pockets lined. Part two, I remember seeing something regarding specialty freezer storage for shelf life and general transport. I believe that's still valid? Not everywhere has the logistical bandwidth for transport or storage of this. Then take into the legally abiding procedures to ensure the safety of the drug itself, which we should all be thankful for. Piss poor pharma is already a problem as is, we don't need more issues. Then general legal hurdles of deployment and tracking, yada yada. This isn't like sewing up a mask, bubble wrap Fedex it out. Damn it, I defended pharma. I'm going to Hell for that.
The world as we now it runs on supply chains. And yet, pople still think electricity comes from a plug, milk from bottle in a supermarket. As does toilet paper, and we all know how that worked out last year. That people have the expectation that once a contract for a vaccine is signed, and the vaccine is approved, enough doses are immediately available to inculate everyone id dangerous. Especially since a lot of politicians seem to think exactly the same way.
The UK is not blocking exports. The EU were free to conclude contracts with the (not very productive) UK manufacturers at the same time HM government was doing so.
To be nonsense it would need to also not have happened in practice. The UK and the US have not exported the vaccines and kept them all for themselves. This is fact not nonsense.
CEO of AstraZeneca: "But the UK contract was signed three months before the European vaccine deal." "When we entered the agreement with Oxford, they had already been working with the UK government on this. "
Its more complicated than that. These deal are not executed, the moment the final signature is signed.
Instead, there are multiple steps along the way, that matter much more than some singular data point of a very long contract process that has many stages.
Can you give a citation for that. The generally agreed figure is that it was done 3 months later. Bear in mind, the EU has still not even approved production from the AZ Halix plant. EU has generally been doing things slower than the UK.
You're being fed BS. AZ signed with the Alliance, that contract was turned over to the EU comission. AZ is most likely caught up in giving their vaccine to the UK first and they are lying constantly. See the controversy on their efficacy in the US.
Hmm. I did a quick scan read over the Politico article, but I'm confused. It doesn't seem to be about contracts and the words "contract" and "alliance" don't appear in it. Did you copy/paste the wrong link?
I also tried the two France24 links. They're both 404 Not Founds. The final link is also a 404. That's a bit odd. Where are you getting these links from? At any rate, the result is you've not provided any evidence that AZ is lying, which is a very bold claim to begin with. Why would they do that? AZ is part Swedish and has a Greek CEO, it's not like they're a 100% pure British firm of tub-thumping Brexit supporting patriots who inexplicably don't want to supply Europe with vaccine. Although by now I wouldn't be surprised if they're thoroughly sick of the EU and its games.
Meanwhile the EU has:
a) The motive to lie.
b) A track record of doing so repeatedly, a completely undeniable one.
It's ridiculous how often the EU or leaders of members states have said totally untrue things about this vaccine or the UK, I made a list at some point (see my old comments) and within a week there'd been another two lies coming out of Europe. I'm not the one being fed BS here - in many of those cases Europe's leaders have already admitted they'd said untrue things!
Asked about the Halix situation, the commission said on Friday that the EMA was ready to fast-track authorisation of new production facilities once it received an application and the necessary information from AstraZeneca.
I don't really understand what's going on with the Halix plant, but surely there must be more to it than that. There's presumably no way the EMA are just sitting there going "well we can't do anything until they mail us over the papers".
Certainly the UK MHRA have been working closely with the companies to move the process along very quickly, as has been confirmed by both the government and the companies themselves.
I'm curious to know what's really going on at the Halix plant.
Knowing how these sorts of regulations work, there's probably considerable scope for speeding things up by parallelising. That's apparently how the MHRA went faster. Usually the regulator would demand a complete pack of information in specific formats, etc, so you have to wait for all the components to be ready before submission (which may well cost money, I'm not sure, but for corporate approvals like that it often does).
In the absence of further guidance and given the EU's hostility to them so far, AZ may be waiting to ensure it has all its ducks in a row before submitting.
In the UK the regulator was willing to do partial processing of applications in parallel with the project being executed, which isn't normal and poses obvious complexities, but can speed things up when latency is what matters most. If the EMA hasn't indicated any willingness to do that, and it's not the first time they've come up with this "we're waiting for submission" business, then it may be causing artificial delays.
It is in EMAs interest to do incremental processing and this is what they have been doing in other cases.
It is in AZs interest to not start the process which would make the factory available for EU, where AZ is not willing to deliver at this time. (Instead, they ship doses even from the EU factories to UK and elsewhere.)
Given this, you would need something concrete to back your speculation to the contrary.
Can you provide a citation for the EMA doing parallel processing because I have yet to hear about that and in fact read the opposite.
It's not in AZ's interest to keep an expensive factory idled in an environment of unprecedented demand, obviously. They want to sell vaccine to whoever will take it. AZ is "unwilling" to deliver to the EU because it has signed contracts putting other countries first and they are able to consume the entire supply. Once the UK is done, they will suddenly become "willing" (if such a term makes sense when contracts are involved) to deliver to the EU as well.
So to be clear, you are describing factual statements as speculation (which is wrong) and then making spurious claims about AZ/EMA's claimed interests instead of what they're actually doing.
> Can you provide a citation for the EMA doing parallel processing
"Rolling review" is the term I've seen typically used for the process that you described, and Wikipedia has references for various rolling reviews by EMA starting with the following: "In October 2020, the Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use (CHMP) of the European Medicines Agency (EMA) started 'rolling reviews' of the vaccines known as COVID-19 Vaccine AstraZeneca (ChAdOx1-SARS-CoV-2) and Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine (BNT162b2)."https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_COVID-19_vaccine_de...
Then I wonder how it has ended in a situation where a factory is apparently ready to go to produce but is waiting for regulatory approval, and the regulators are claiming they're waiting for paperwork to be submitted. That shouldn't be possible in a genuinely parallel review process.
The parent comment is a reply to me so I’ll assume you’re also referring to me:
1. I voted remain and would again.
2. Everybody I’ve spoken to that actually lives in the EU agrees the EU has screwed up - it seems to mostly be remain voters who can’t move on who disagree with this.
3. If you have evidence contrary to my comment share it, keep the personal attacks to yourself.
I actually live in the EU and I don't feel the commission has screwed up on this. I love that we have a somewhat equitable distribution model across the union. The core issues have been with producers heavily overpromising supply on the expectation that approval would take months longer, and with national politicians repeating those unrealistic promises verbatim to their populations to improve their popularity, and then blaming the EU when producers failed to deliver on their promises. AZ has been the worst about this, delivering dramatically less than promised, and have been scumbags in general about it, notifying the commission very late, sometimes after deadlines were already missed. Together with their refusal to be open about export movements EU->UK they've managed to create an enormous amount of suspicion.
Whichever country is contractually at the front of the line will have their order fulfilled first/according to the terms of the contracts.
The EU wasted months negotiating lower prices and then took longer with approvals.
There is no good guy or bad guy (at least until the UK or EU blocks exports preventing execution of the private contracts - at that point the country blocking the exports becomes the bad guy).