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Comment by supergirl | Hacker News Reader

what should they have done differently? they signed a contract and assumed the other party will honor it. the other party chose to not honor it, which was a big gamble. we'll see how that will work out for them in the long term, now that they irritated most EU countries.

they did the same with pfizer and that seems to work.

US is blocking exports, "americans first". EU didn't do that but now they have to since the supplier doesn't care about contracts.

suddenly HN is keen on defending big pharma. if this happened in the US I can't even imagine the outcry.

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We now know from them failing to redact the contracts properly that the EU were lying and AZ wasn't breaching anything. It's simple, you order last, you get delivered to last.

Agree on the first part, disagree on the second one. One of the largest reasons for the reduced deliveries is, IMHO, the additional orders the EU was pressured into by the public and media. Because manufacturers, incl. Biontech/Pfizer, had to increase capacities which let to short term capacity reductions as they closed down factories and rebuild them.

Yeah, you're probably right. I forget that supply-chain logistics is a bit different to ordering on Amazon. It only really matters what it says in the contract and if it doesn't say anything about when the EU gets its vaccines, then surely it is up to AZ when they deliver?

Yep, but usually exact delivery dtaes are part of the individual purchase rders. Penalties and so on are part of the contract so. And there the EU - AZ contract is so vague, no company would buy anything else than office supplies with similar terms. One example is "best-effort", what ever that means. And that AZ is redeemed of any consequences for late deliveries if the EU ordered more than initially contracted and AZ has to increase capacities for these orders. And that seems to be exactly what happened.

And with AZ being, I could imagine, pretty pissed at the EU (and memeber states) right now, I think that doesn't really help neither.

Not wasted 3 months trying to save a couple of bucks and gathering mpre political power for the EU, and then expect the vaccines they ordered to be ready at the same time as those of countries who ordered right away.

no, I don't think it matters when you sign the contract. it only matters what's written in the contract.

so unless the contract explicitly said "EU gets vaccines only after other countries get vaccines", this is just a meme.

Especially when the EU’s contract was signed before the UK’s.

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