They are contracts and dates on which x million doses are to be delivered by. Why didn't EU do the same? Crying now it's too late and a trade war can go both ways. Say, no vaccine would be produced unless a certain item that is produced in USA goes to a Belgium factory.
The only difference is that the EU remained truthful to the free market while both the USA and the UK put country first closes.
> Crying now it's too late and a trade war can go both ways.
There are no trade wars. Both the USA and the UK have shown themselves to be extremely unreliable partners which will not respect the rules they profess to believe in as soon as it doesn't favor them. That was already obvious with Trump and is only more obvious now.
I fully expect the USA to lose its place as the main global power in the next decade if not sooner. The UK will probably pay the price a lot sooner as the EU is not going to forget and they have no other reliable ally.
"The EU reached a deal with Pfizer in November for 300 million doses and in January negotiated a preliminary deal for another 300 million." https://www.dw.com/en/eu-orders-300-million-more-biontech-pf...
USA agreed to buy 100-500 Million in JULY 2020 https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/22/health/pfizer-covid-19-va...
The fact is that EU is too slow, too risk adverse and 28 countries must agree. In USA the President winks, and it's done. (In this case it was beneficial.)
Not strictly true, as for these purposes the UK was still bound by EU rules until Jan 1st this year and did its own thing for the vaccinations without breaking those rules.
The EU nations generally like to work together and negotiate as one, as doing so saves money; money was the wrong thing to optimise for in this case.
Right. Probably should have optimized for human life. Hindsight is 20/20.
The EU was in the difficult position, as either the eurosceptics in the poor countries would complain that the EU was throwing them to the wolves, or the eurosceptics in the rich countries would complain that they were having to subsidise the poor countries who refused to pay the full amount.
When faced with a global pandemic, vaccinating just your own country while your neighbours become a breeding ground for new variants isn't really solving the problem, especially if your neighbours are closely integrated with you and citizens have freedom of movement across borders. This is why we can't have nice things.
If what you mean is "reaching the correct decision quickly" then that sounds like it's begging the question, because correctness is subjective and it has to be optimised relative to certain other criteria than just speed.
I agree with you, though, that it is definitely worth looking at death count per capita (of different jurisdictions) and compare that with the costs of vaccination programs and lockdowns. Those won't be easy calculations to make, but after keeping epidemiologists and economists busy for the rest of the decade we may eventually learn some fascinating lessons from all this.
This way of looking at things ignores the astonishing cost of maintaining emergency support payments to people and businesses, which are significantly more expensive than the price differential on vaccines. Ireland's spending over a million euro per hour on that and will now be forced to do so for thousands of additional hours.
The US signed their AZ deal months before the EU and UK. They threw billions of dollars at every company they could find, readily paying high rates while other countries tried to negotiate lower ones. So I'm really not sure where this idea of yours comes from.
$1.2 Billion to AZ in May: https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2020/05/21/trump-administrati...
EU's deal was signed in August: https://www.fiercepharma.com/manufacturing/az-nets-396m-down...
$1.95 Billion to Pfizer in July: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/10/health/was-the-pfizer-vac...
EU's deal with Pfizer was in November: https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...
Clicking through your second link you get to the article about the US deal on the 21st of May: https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/astrazeneca-scores-1b-fr...
and again for the UK deal on the 17th of May: https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/after-signing-up-to-deli...
There are trade wars, and there will continue to be.
> Both the USA and the UK have shown themselves to be extremely unreliable partners which will not respect the rules they profess to believe in as soon as it doesn't favor them.
That's rich coming from the folks responsible for GDPR. You pollute our web, and then cry about things that don't favor you? Boo-hoo.
I want to get your view and if I think it’s valid, I want to pass it onto my MP, to put democratic pressure for the UK to maintain its status of a rules-based society.
Germany gave BioNTech 445M. The US didn't give Pfizer/BioNTech anything.
The fact is when Pfizer showed up with a vaccine, they knew they could sell $2 billion to the US and would have legal recourse if the US government didn't pay. That's as firm as it gets.
To use your analogy, farmers can sign contracts for "all the apples that's produced this year" if they want to offload the risk of crop failure rather than a contract for a specific number of apples.
Pfizer knew for a fact, even if COVID was miraculously cured, or it turned out there was a super cheap treatment, or anything that made their vaccine worthless, they could still sell $2 billion units to the US.
With democrat president? Who would have thought.
Based on this report (which is somewhat anecdotal), the EU exported ~10m vaccine doses to the UK - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-18/europe-wi...
The majority of these doses will be Pfizer, as there's no production in the UK and the UK's MHRA reported ~10m people had a first Pfizer dose by end of Feb
Everyone I know (me included) is currently being given AZ vaccine and I presume the Pfizer is being retained for second shots for those who've already had it.
Of course there's politics in play, as well as the challenges of scaling up vaccine production but IMV biggest thing Britain could do is give enough Ireland enough doses to speedup the vaccination of their population
That's why the USA didn't bother ordering rapidely. They knew they could use the defense act and executive orders to block exports and they did as soon as they could. Even Canada is buying vaccines in Belgium.
The UK was wise. They prevented Oxford associating with Merks and forced them to partner with AstraZeneca. That's the key take away from the pfizer debacle and the Nordstream interferences. Europe needs to strike American companies hard and push them out of the European market as fast as possible. The USA is not our ally.
I want to the EU to be a close ally to the US, but it is not the EU who is the problem here.
China's final assembly companies are not the only kind of manufacturing and not the most worthwhile part of it, although Shenzhen is certainly good at electronics.
Here’s the CEO of AZ explaining why the three month extra time was important.
> The UK signed off its deal with AstraZeneca in June 2020, three months before the EU did
So I’m not sure what to believe.
"However, the key lies in an earlier agreement that AstraZeneca made back in May with the U.K., which was a binding deal establishing “the development of a dedicated supply chain for the U.K.,” an AstraZeneca spokesperson said."
Quote is from this article: https://www.politico.eu/article/the-key-differences-between-...
Except it didn't, the UK signed in august.
The link also says they wouldn't export EU manufactured vaccines, except Italy blocked an export to Australia a couple of weeks ago.
That's why it was considered "news" when it was reported that one particular contract was signed by the UK one day after the EU. But that's not the full story, since the UK had binding contracts with AZ well before that.
"The link also says they wouldn't export EU manufactured vaccines, except Italy blocked an export to Australia a couple of weeks ago." I haven't seen that claim in the article you linked.
AZ is selling at cost, so they are not making a profit from the vaccine atm. So that statement should be trivially true.
It seems the cost price differs from country to country because of different production costs and other factors (maybe shipping).
[1] https://www.politico.eu/article/astrazeneca-vaccine-cost-hig...
And press releases saying they are ready to go don't count as signing contracts.
All your links are rooted in AZ press releases, which means nothing.
I've seen the articles mention may, june and august as signing dates of the contract, so clearly there is some 'miscommunication'. And both the may and june date originates from AZ, while the actual date turns out to be august.
It's impossible to prove there wasn't a contract signed, it is however possible to prove a contract was signed. Your articles never provided evidence for the date the contract was signed.
"And as POLITICO reported last week, the non-redacted version of the contract shows that the EU also waived its right to sue AstraZeneca in the event of delivery delays."
Quote from this article: https://www.politico.eu/article/the-key-differences-between-...