Not agreeing/disagreeing on the misinformation, but regarding the failure:
The EU negotiated badly, and AZ used that to fool them. I think AZ deserves some moral blame here as well.
The EU negotiated badly, and AZ used that to fool them. I think AZ deserves some moral blame here as well.
More fun if it turns out the AstraZeneca vaccine is useless.
Why would AZ agree to a contract to guarantee certain deliveries on a brand new vaccine with unproven manufacturing, on a non-profit basis? It doesn't make any sense.
The other thing which isn't mentioned is the UK's deliveries were also cut, probably even more severely than the EU ones. The UK was originally meant to get many tens of millions of doses by the end of 2020, in reality it was far far less.
https://theconversation.com/astrazeneca-dispute-comes-at-a-d...
> AstraZeneca has reduced its projected vaccine rollout to the EU, despite signing a contract to supply millions of doses, citing an issue with a plant in Belgium. It did not, however, cut its supplies to the UK.
The UK negotiated completely independent supply chain that they paid for up front. It isn't comparable.
If the contract really said best effort everywhere, they may have a leg to stand on, since that seems to preclude using different delivery guarantees in other contracts.
Completely unacceptable and unsupportable suggestion.
The EU had absolute clarity on the differing supply chains for differing contracts with AZ. No amount of contract negotiation increase culture yields in vaccine production lines.