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Comment by illuminati1911 | Hacker News Reader

illuminati1911

It is at least partly developed (or funded) publicly.

Lots of comments are complaining about how EU "paid less" for the vaccine than country XYZ, but actually EU funded AstraZeneca with hundreds of millions of euros to develop the vaccine in the first place.

In any case unless AZ, EU etc. are able to come to reasonable agreement I think this might eventually lead to EU simply breaking the patent and then anyone can make the vaccine. That would be extremely hardcore measure to use, but in current situation, definitely possible.

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Oxford A/Z vaccine was developed at Oxford university and AZ joined later to manufacture it (after UK gov intervened, Oxford team was originally in talks with US Merck). This article [1] has back story.

EU paid millions to pharma companies (€1.78bn), that's true. However UK paid more than that(€1.9bn) and US invested even more €9bn.[1] I personally do not understand why EU bargained to start with and why it did not invest more, when damages are much bigger.

I do not think EU can break any patent, they do not own it. "Vaccitech owns intellectual property used in the Oxford vaccine's development" [2]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/jan/29/we-had-to-go...

[2] https://www.irishcentral.com/news/irish-professor-oxford-vac...

The "at cost" thing comes from the IP agreement between the University of Oxford and AZ. The EU has nothing to do with it.

Hundreds of millions of dollars? Not even a billion dollars was set aside for vaccines as trillions of dollars are being lost?

That's what many people are getting mad about.

Germany wanted to order from Biontech in July 2020 but the EU convinced them to let the EU order for a better "collective bargaining position". But this isn't the time to bargain. Just pay them a few billion Euros. Germany alone is estimated to be currently subsidizing its shut-down economy with around 4 billion Euros a week. Each week is more expensive than what the EU was willing to pay for advanced orders: 2.7 billion.

This was not the EU pushing, rather the smaller countries were scared that they'd be left out and thus put pressure on the German government to agree to do it jointly.

That said, the main source for the story tha the negotiations were advanced is the German health minister who has skin in the game and reason to try and assign the blame elsewhere...

It was the EU pushing for the Commission to negotiate even though it was clear the Inclusive Vaccine Alliance (IVA) composed of the four countries were planning to supply all member states. There are multiple sources on this deal including the official AZ press release, although the harsher criticism of the Commission's role is from Spahn as you say.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-vaccin...

https://www.astrazeneca.com/media-centre/press-releases/2020...

https://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/europe-s-vaccine...

Just paying more to get further in the queue is not a good solution. That's just a zero sum game.

What is better is removing all obstacles from the vaccine mass production scaling.

That's just one vaccine, there are half a dozen that have resulted in usable products, and many, many more that didn't pan out.

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