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Comment by FranzFerdiNaN | Hacker News Reader

This os the EU being a good ally. The expectation was that the UK and US would also help by exporting part of their production, which was indeed dumb.

The US also didnt secure such contracts, they simply forbid any export. The UK is helped by AZ not sending anything produced in the UK to the EU, despite the EU contract stipulating that doses would also come from the UK.

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No, the expectation was that the EU vaccine demand would be supplied by EU factories. The UK doesn't even have final manufacturing for any vaccines other than the AstraZeneca one - for the most part, our government has taken a policy of funding and signing contracts with the same factories supplying the EU and assuming they wouldn't pull some export ban stunt to distract from their own problems. (This was probably naive.) And as for the AstraZeneca vaccine, the expectation that the contracted-for doses would come from their EU factories is literally written into their contract with the EU...

Lipids for the Pfizer vaccine are manufactured in the UK. A total EU export ban would have elicited a response nobody would have liked.

Not just that; quite a lot of EU AZ production goes to the UK, too.

Do you have a source on that? I was under impression that the UK manufactures their entire AZ stock and the only vaccine produced in the EU for the UK is Pfizer/BioNTech

70% of the doses the EU bought were instead delivered to the UK to fulfill AZ's obligation to the UK.

After that initial batch, a further 8 million EU doses were exported to the UK, and a further 46 million EU doses were exported to other countries, including the US.

Just this second batch would have tripled the EU's vaccination rate so far.

The UK doesn't quite manufacture its entire supply of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine - some is imported from India, and apparently one small batch was from a factory in the Netherlands which doesn't have enough production capacity to make much of a dent in the European demand: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/56483766 But yeah, the vast majority is apparently locally manufactured.

The EU has been pushing the conspiracy theory that the reason there's a shortfall in supply of the AstraZeneca vaccine there is because they've been exporting it all to Britain, but there's no evidence for that which anyone can find and the numbers don't add up either.

>>The US also didnt secure such contracts, they simply forbid any export.

USA bought vaccines from everyone a year ago and opened the check book, giving them billions without knowing if the vaccine will work. And then put all their weight to help them find factories and stuff. So USA gambled relatively nothing (Covid has cost many trillions) and gained a lot.

EU doing what they do best...meetings. USA bans exports in this sense: if Pfizer agreed to give USA 50 million shots in March, no exports until that number is delivered. Seems fair.

Pfizer wasn't part of Operation Warp Speed, they refused to join because they figured the bureaucracy would slow them down.

They did take some money from Germany though, because it came without strings.

Is it a coincidence that they were the first vaccine approved?

So to be fair it should be Germany getting all those Pfizer shots rather than the US.

But USA signed a purchase agreement to buy the vaccines way before EU did. Pfizer is obligated to deliver them first. Warp speed was just to get it going, USA would cover any loses.

Can we agree that $20 or even $50 Billion is NOTHING to USA or EU at this point...each month in delays costs more. USA realized that a year ago and blocked doses from all, including 100 million Pfizer doses in July 2020. https://investors.pfizer.com/investor-news/press-release-det...

You cannot compare this just by contracts. The US is blocking all exports of COVID-19 vaccines (except for AZ to Mexico and Canada just now). Pfizer/Biontech were until just a few weeks ago only producing in one location inside the EU so they were bottlenecked in fulfilling EU demand. Meanwhile the EU doesn't block exports.

The EU did a bad job but we have to keep the facts straight.

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