The EU didn’t make them, companies with facilities in the EU did. They were exported because the EU managed to delay its procurement process and other countries made their orders earlier.
The EU could take both the US or the UK route to prevent these exports:
- The EU could rightfully, and has the power to, prevent exports that are essential in a period of crises - which clearly applies to the current situation in Europe. This is the USA route, and it's legitimate.
- The EU can control AZ exports to guarantee they are fulfilling their contractual obligations, which AZ has been literally joking in the face of the EU. This is the UK route, and it's legitimate.
What the media is currently reporting is the second one, the EU is forcing the manufacturer to comply with their contract. If this overlaps with the UK contract, well then that's something I believe the UK must deal with the manufacturer like the EU has been doing for the past 3 months.
I just don't get the double standards, the UK enforcing a contract is good... the EU doing the same is... bad?
Well, it looks like British tabloids are influencing this point of view in English speaking countries.
They tailor narratives and pump the crap out of it, even if it contains wrong information or if it's things completely irrelevant of what's being discussed but that supports the narrative.
Using such executive powers for handling contract dispute is authoritarian move. These powers should be used for impartial regulation of market, not for contract dispute where EC is one side. In liberal democracies, contract disputes even with government are handled by courts.
The executive implements those rules.
Such rules are in an emergency scenario - which the EU currently is in, with third waves all over Europe, and a lot of the vulnerable citizens yet to be vaccinated due to the terrible job AZ has been doing.
If there's a time to trigger these mechanisms is now.
You're just trying to reframe this into a way of controlling the market, which is wrong and biased. This is already beyond a contract dispute, it's about saving lives, and the cost is to make a single pharmaceutical company accountable for their mistakes and their promises.
Just like the UK is doing what it needs to do to have his contract fulfilled to save british lives, by not allowing exports of AZ vaccine by enforcing the contract that's making AZ partially fail the EU contract, the EU will use it's own mechanisms to ensure the safety of EU citizens.
the UK isn't doing anything special. they just signed a better contract than the other guys.
what the EU should have done is recognised their mistake and fix it via a massive injection of funds. instead they decided to fund the recovery and penny-pinch on the vaccines.
in any case, this whole non-issue is politicising of the lowest degree. the EU will get more vaccines than Africa or Asia as a whole in a few weeks, making this whole discussion moot.
This is yet another one of those narratives pumped by British media: "the better contract". This is meaningless, because AZ still signed a contract with the EU that clearly states that no other commitment should overlap with such contract. So they are either forcefully or willingly choosing to fulfill some contracts over others - none of those reasons is an excuse. That's AZ problem, not EU problem.
In case you didn't notice it's only working for vaccines made in the UK (which according to AZ CEO the UK didn't allow any exports of that production).
Basically the UK is enforcing the company to fulfill their contractual obligations, where they have power to enforce it, which is in the UK, and that's fine.
But you can't expect other countries not to do the exact same thing - which is what the EU is doing. And now Boris is lobbying around to try to stop this, and of course the short-sighted vaccine nationalism of not allowing the company to fulfill other contracts came around to slap him in the face.
There's no goodwill towards Boris government, and now they want to make a deal with no leverage, after months of bashing the EU for trusting a free market and a private company while the UK hoarded the full local production without any transparency (yes those records are private for "security reasons").
Good luck with that.
If you want to play this game, then companies didn't but EU citizens that work at those factories did create them.
I am not sure why there is even a discussion on these points: the EU was late, and once they were late they did almost everything wrong (unsurprisingly, countries in Europe have a terrible record on vaccines)...that is it.
This is utterly false. The vaccine is being used as quickly as it comes in. As of yesterday, more than 75% of all doses delivered to Germany have been administered. (Source: https://impfdashboard.de/) this includes the slow-down from temporarily halting the use of AstraZeneca.
While the UK is vaccination their population at 3.5x the rate of Germany, the majority of that is due to the lack of supplies. If Germany was vaccinating at a rate of 750k/day, ever dose would be applied in 5 days. Considering big deliveries only happen ~1/week this is neither feasible nor desirable.
Seems to me like being able to rely on the delivery schedule would be a prerequisite for not holding back doses. I thought this was stupid at first, but that was giving AZ the benefit of the doubt, which they have now repeatedly shown is unwise. You can't have just-in-time delivery with a partner as unreliable as AZ. Maybe this will change in a few months, or maybe at that point they'll decide to sell to someone else instead, who knows.
Germany insists on administering the second shot after three weeks
Did you mean months? Because I know first hand that at least one region administers the second shot three months after the first one, as in: I handled the appointment, and I wasn't given a choice in the length of time between shots. So three weeks is just false. As far as I know that's the recommendation everywhere in Germany.
Regarding delivery schedules, one core function of supply chain management is following up with suppliers on these. And coordinate that with everyone else, e.g. vaccination centers. Blindly relying on whatever the supplier says, in AZs case months ago, doesn't work.
I find that hard to believe as the minimum interval that's approved by European and German regulators is 4 weeks for AZ. The recommended interval in Germany is 12 weeks. Maybe you are thinking of Biontech, where 3 weeks is the minimum approved interval.