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Comment by vagrantJin | Hacker News Reader

South Africans have adopted an outrage persona that's hard to ignore.

We're serial complainers. Maybe it's the ever-present cloud of former british colonial rule and their custom of complaining ad nauseum.

Yes, we are corrupt. Yes, we made absolutely brain dead decisions. Yes, we are headed into a black whole of a failed state (experiment?)

But the bullshit pulled by AZ isn't surprising - given how little regard most of the world has for the continent and they should be called out for it. The vaccine wasn't a generous donation.

But we aren't helping ourselves either.

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> The vaccine wasn't a generous donation.

Note that AstraZeneca's agreement with Oxford is that it will manufacture the vaccine on an at cost basis for as long as the pandemic lasts (and no sooner than July 2021).

While it's not a donation, it's also not being sold for a profit; they may be able to make a profit in the future.

Source: https://www.ft.com/content/c474f9e1-8807-4e57-9c79-6f4af145b...

How does that square with AZ charging SA "nearly 2.5 times higher than most European countries"?[0][1]

The Guardian claims that an official claimed that they were told by AZ that the discrepancy is due to European countries having paid for R&D, but anybody in the chain could have been lying.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/22/south-africa-p...

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-safric...

> How does that square with AZ charging SA "nearly 2.5 times higher than most European countries"?[0][1]

At least you are getting it. We Europeans seem to have pre-funded production and now it turns out much of it is shipped to higher-paying customers first, and we must wait until "production issues" are solved.

That’s from two different producers, one is AZ in Europe, the other the Serum Institute in India. Maybe they just have different costs.

A country being charged less because they paid for R&D makes perfect sense to me if pricing is being done at an at-cost basis.

Also, put another way, those EU countries are probably getting charged less than the average costs to actually make the doses themselves. That's fine.

In principle it makes sense.

An issue is that R&D is a fixed cost rather than a variable cost, so determining how the R&D costs are to be split among AZ's customers is pretty hard and potentially prone to abuse. Are they to be split among all expected customers before the pandemic ends? All expected customers during the lifetime of the vaccine? During the lifetime of this family of vaccines?

Given that apparently it makes up the majority of the price, it's quite an important detail.

> Yes, we are corrupt.

If you are corrupt, please do the right thing and turn yourself in to the authorities.

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