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Comment by phatfish | Hacker News Reader

To produce the vaccine so fast that had to be done.

The issues European production partners (one in Belgium I think) are suffering with the AstraZeneca vaccine are similar to those already solved at the UK production sites months ago because of the risk taken to start production early.

Each production facility can have unique issues that effect yield that simply need time to resolve.

Maybe AstraZeneca over promised, but it feels like risks to production yield were not properly assessed by those in charge of ensuring vaccine supply in the EU.

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I think we're talking about different things here.

The unproven strategy that I meant was the one where a longer period ellapses between first and second jabs than had ever been tested. This new data is the test and shows that we probably don't now need to be concerned about that as we did when the strategy was first decided on and implemented.

The conservative approach would have been to ensure everyone got 2 jabs with the elapsed time between them the amount of time that had been tested until this data came in to show that a longer period would actually still work.

I don't know what the advantage of more people with a single jab is. Does anyone? Are you less likely to die? Or we hope so but don't have the data yet - the other leg of this bet so to speak.

The EU has a contract with AZ that makes ensuring vaccine supply to the EU the company's problem, even explicitly requiring the use of UK plants for this purpose if need be.

The problem is that AZ had also promised the UK it would have priority over the goods produced on its soil :

https://www.irishtimes.com/business/health-pharma/dragging-a...

they might have a contract with AZ, but it's very likely to be the wrong AZ...

instead of AstraZeneca plc (.uk parent company) their contract is with AstraZeneca AB (.se subsidiary)

the UK vaccine operation will be under the control of AB plc

I would bet the commission insisted on having it with an EU entity without having thought the ramifications

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