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Comment by blibble | Hacker News Reader

> However, you can also see it as the EU has no real power at all and is just an easy target to get fooled over by other countries..

the position it finds itself in is entirely a result of its inability to competently and promptly negotiate contracts with its suppliers

it was entirely focused on price instead of delivery, and it took months more than the suppliers other customers (e.g. the UK) to agree anything

none of this is surprising behavior for an organisation that is primarily a producer's cartel

the mistake was putting such an organisation in charge of the procurement in the first place

the other outrageous fact is that France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands (the "Inclusive Vaccine Alliance") had all but signed a deal back in June, then the EU commission forced itself into the process, spent three months trying to re-negotiate (for a product being produced at cost), then signed the original deal regardless

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It seems that they focused too much on price.

Like if a few cents or even a few euros per dose would make any difference considering the accruing cost of the pandemic.

Problems like these, availability of goods and distribution, are usually not solved by throwing money at them.

On the contrary, that's exactly how they are solved.

You can entice suppliers to serve you first by paying more than others, that's what Israel did.

I don't think that distribution is an issue but that can also be resolved by throwing money directly or through resources at it. Same for production and supply.

It was useless and counter-productive to drag negotiations to lower prices while throwing away 10s of billions a month to prop up locked down economies. It would have been more useful to work with suppliers to go all in on production with unlimited funds and resources so that as many factories as possible could produce (and that would have probably been cheaper overall).

Adding new production not only costs money, but also takes time. And while the EU has money, time was the problem. Risking to repeat myself, the initial orders were enough. And they took the existing production capacity i to account. Except some early prod hick ups, things were running rather smooth on the production end, until the public and media pressured the EU to increase order volumes.

I think the vaccine distribution will solve itself, not by throwing money at it but by the vaccine surplus we will have come June/July. It will be solved by throwing inventory at it, inventory covers up all kind of supply chain issues. Stringent supply management and control would be a lit faster and more efficient so. Ordering more probably made the problems worse, kind of like ehat happened with toilet paper a year ago.

The goal was not be the first to start, but to be fast to finish inoculation of the EU population. The initial ordering of the EU allowed that, everything member states and the EU did since January made this goal harder to achieve. And made it harder for developing countries to start their campaigns. All because the media knows shit about numbers, the politicians know shit about supply chains and everybody cares more about PR and elections than solving a problem.

Money doesn't always buy competence.

No, but lack of money doesn't either.

I do not care one single iota about who was first or paid most. What is clear is that people are dying unnecessarily because of this competition. The ethical thing would to be minimise the number of people dying of covid-19.

Distributing these vaccines evenly based upon risk factors (age, BMI, ...) is what should have happened. Practical example:

- My double marathon running, under 40 brother in law in Israel is low risk. He should not have received the vaccine yet, even if I like him.

- My heavily overweight 71 years old father is high risk. He should have received the vaccine already.

The EU, the UK, the US, Israel _and_ most of the manufacturers failed abysmally at this.

Straight out disagree. One of the most fundamental purposes of a country is to prioritize the interests (and most fundamentally life) of its own citizens.

If countries agreed on things like resource distribution, human rights, economic structure, reward incentives, culture, there would be no need for different nations.

This is purely a negotiation. "Ethics" is a weak appeal stemming from a failure to plan, invest, and execute.

The loyalties of a country's government should absolutely be with its constituents. That loyalty does not necessarily mean that the health of its inhabitants only should be the government's concern.

I can perfectly imagine a healthy 40 years old UK constituent supporting the idea that a 80 years old EU constituent should get priority over him. Or the other way round obviously, should that situation ever occur. Governments could take that into account, but we don't even have to go down that contentious rabbit hole to find points of consensus.

I just happen to think that an opportunity to reach a Pareto optimum was missed in negotiations, particularly between the UK and the EU.

Would an agreement on proportionality in vaccine distribution really have been so difficult between the EU and the UK for example? That would have produced real advantages for both sides.

Both governments can harm each other's vaccine supplies, and it's increasingly looking like that could also become reality. That's lose-lose instead of win-win.

The problem with that is that in reality, there's very little the UK can do to supply the EU with a meaningful number of vaccines. You've got to remember that the UK has less than a sixth the population of the EU and doesn't have much local pharmaceutical manufacturing. What Covid-19 vaccine manufacturing we do have only has enough capacity to supply part of the UK demand as, basically, a back-up plan in case everyone goes vaccine nationalist and bans exports.

Any real solution to the EU's vaccination problem basically has to involve fixing their vaccine supply chains, not getting magical extra vaccines from somewhere else because there is no supply of vaccines from elsewhere that could fill their gaps. All the rabble-rousing about UK-made vaccines from the European Commission and the rest of the EU is just an attempt to distract from that because the actual cause is really politically inconvenient for the people trying to blame the UK.

> I do not care one single iota about who was first or paid most.

This is 100% guaranteed method to get shitty vaccine development and production in the future.

Money is the ultimate incentive - instead of haggling down they should have measured the cost of damages caused by delayed vaccination and tried to outbid.

This idiotic notion that we should prevent pharma companies from profiting on this is exactly why nobody wants to do vaccine development in the first place.

More than that they should have helped invest in production im hope that things would work. The US wwasn't known as a vaccine production power before, but with some investment we have a significant supply now.

Does that even make sense?

What if your 71 year old father is an agoraphobic hermit and your brother has some wonder job that puts him in a position to literally save the lives of other people as long as he's in close proximity to them.

I understand this is a hard to credit hypothetical but in those circumstances or similar ones we might want your brother at the head of the line. Not because he's more likely to die but because he's more likely to infect me. Or say, any hypothetical fellow citizen.

Frankly I think the most critical thing is to get as many people vaccinated as quickly as possible. Any other criteria should come after "as many as quickly." After that sure, have an argument over if more important to get people who might die vaccinated or people who might spread it vaccinated. Knock yourself out - but don't get in the way of the critical thing.

> Distributing these vaccines evenly based upon risk factors (age, BMI, ...) is what should have happened.

this is exactly what the UK has been doing?

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/17157/production...

I suspect the poster was saying that 80 year olds in India should receive the vaccination before 50 year olds in New York

The good part is that they are.

> The ethical thing would to be minimise the number of people dying of covid-19.

Yes and when the EU delays signing contracts, and focuses so much on price, they cause more people to die from covid by slowing the process along.

I agree that the best way forward would have been to minimize deaths of covid, by them not worrying so much about prices and instead supporting development of the vaccine as quickly as possible.

Is that at all possible on the time scales we're talking about? It depends so much on the distribution networks, health services, willingness of population and everything else of each individual country.

Unless I read this wrong. You are seriously suggesting that we should do global risk-factor prioritization? Meaning that the 50year olds in New York are not allowed to take their doses until 70 year old anti-vaxxerss in the Slovenian alps have had theirs?

This is not true, the contract for EU and UK are largely the same. The EU even signed 1 day earlier.

This is FUD originating from AZ, which are downright lying.

No, this isn't FUD. AZ wasn't lying. Yes, it's true that the EU signed one particular contract one day before the UK on August 27. However, the UK had a binding contract with AZ since May already.

"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."

This quote is from this article: https://www.politico.eu/article/the-key-differences-between-...

The origin of the UKs priority access to the AZ vaccine was due to their early funding of the Oxford vaccine on condition of 1st priority. This was before AZ even got involved. In fact the UK govt had such deep involvement that they were able to veto a deal between Oxford and Merck to manufacture and distribute the vaccine over fears that it would allow Trump to block their priority access through export controls (as Merck would manufacture in the US) so the UK make Oxford partner with AZ. AZ inherited that pre-existing deal between Oxford and the UK govt.

AZ is lying:

Here the boss is telling the UK signed in june : https://www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-europe-inno...

Except it didn't, the UK signed on august 28th, 1 day after the EU (per your link).

In the interview from my link he also says that no vaccines manufactured in the EU leave for countries outside of the EU.

Except he lies about that too: Italy prohibited the export of vaccines to Australia. Last i checked Australia is not a part of the EU.

Nobody is lying, the redacted agreements do indeed show that the UK agreement is dated to a day after the EU agreement but that says nothing about when money changed hands or prior deals or commitments. You get a 3 month difference between the UK and the EU because the UK had an agreement with AstraZeneca all the way back on the 17th of May (note: June -> Aug is not 3 months, that's sloppy reporting from your linked website) as can be seen here: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/funding-and-manufacturing...

or here: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/may/17/uk-plans-38m...

and this is on top of funding Oxford had received from the UK prior to the Oxford-AZ deal. https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2020-03-24-oxfords-covid-19-resear...

Yet the publicly announced deal with the EU was on the 27th of August: https://www.euractiv.com/section/coronavirus/news/eu-pays-e3...

It should be noted at this point that France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands, had jointly negotiated a deal with AZ in June but my understanding is that after an EU27 vote the EC took over negotiations and you get the final (and first for the EU) deal in August.

Why the redacted UK agreement is dated 28th of August is anybodies guess but some things should be made clear, firstly that the UK started funding AZ in May and not late August, secondly that they did this a month before other EU countries had reached an agreement with AZ, and finally that the EC getting involved added a further 2 months to the negotiation.

I'm not sure AZ said otherwise. I did check and you are correct about signing date.

However the devil as always is in the detail and the two contracts are different and best covered here: https://www.politico.eu/article/the-key-differences-between-...

Crux being the UK contract was a contractual commitment to deliver whilst the EU contract was best effort.

This link says that the contract are comparable: https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/astrazeneca-signed-va...

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