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.
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.