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Comment by klelatti | Hacker News Reader

This seems to me to best sum up the problem with the Commission's position:

> Isn’t the logical absurdity of their interpretation that if AZ were only producing 10 doses a month the Commission is entitled to all of them - notwithstanding that they knew that the UK had entered into a contract months before them.

https://twitter.com/pcavin2/status/1355235189648224260

And note that those 10 doses are of a UK developed vaccine being made in the UK and probably in a manufacturing facility funded by the UK government months before the commission decided to sign this contract.

(And this is not a comment on where the vaccines should go just that the Commission are on very dubious ground with this line of argument - that their contract unilaterally overrides all others).

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None of that is really relevant. Both AZ and EU agreed to this contract. If AZ has signed a contract that they cannot fulfill, then they have commited a fraud.

There was clearly significant risk associated with an unprecedented ramp up of vaccine production and I expect that AZ, Pfizer, J&J etc are all working round the clock to try to deliver as soon as possible.

Fraud implies bad faith which I expect is a long, long way from the truth.

They agreed to a contract much later than the UK, and the UK is the main supplier.

The EU is acting like it has first call because of its size as a bloc.

Sorry, that's not how it works. Not forgetting they broke the Good Friday agreement to try and force the point.

It's not really a contracting issue. It's also not a legal one, because legal enforcement of anything is completely irrelevant for the time scales that matter. The EU is in a position where none of these things can be fixed now.

The fact that the vaccine was developed in the UK and is produced in the UK can not be an argument. In light of the UK's reliance on the EU vaccine, all this does is show the UK contract with AZ as ethically deficient.

After all, the EU is currently the only supplier for the UK for the Pfizer vaccine - the one that kickstarted the UK's early success. How would the UK's vaccine program look now, if the EU had acted similarly from the start?

Sure, the EU could have mandated exactly this last year. But they shouldn't have. It would have been wrong and morally despicable.

The EU SHOULD now deal with their choices with grace. They don't, which is the real shame.

But if you are British and feel smug about your government's cunning, then I seriously doubt your moral compass.

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