Something fishy is going on. Either at AZ or from the outside.
Basically what seems to have happened is that Oxford university developed the vaccine, required that companies who wanted to manufacture and sell it should not make a profit, and therefore only got companies with little vaccine development experience, such as AstraZeneca, which probably due to their lack of experience has been making mistake after mistake.
That being said, we have seen that with COVID the vast majority of vaccines have been extremely successful (some like the Russian and Chinese ones were deployed without complete testing and were shown to have great results), and since we are confident the AZ vaccine is safe enough, ans we can see the impact in the UK, there’s a strong justification to authorize using it even without proper results.
Just not in the US, which already has access to enough vaccines for its population without needing the AZ zone.
Although I disagree that there was any reason to hold up UK approval, there was clear safety and effectiveness evidence that overwhelmed any doubts about safety in spite of the screw ups.
But I have zero sympathy for AZ even if many, many people are compounding their errors.
"This manufacturer has never released an approved vaccine"
and
"This manufacturer is not allowed to make a profit on this product, so there is no monetary incentive to ensure quality after the product is authorized for emergency use"
I fully expect the same quality as soviet era cars.
Hilariously Lada cars - the Soviet era cars being referenced I expect - were exported for the express purpose of making a profit!
What's Pfizer's reputation? Seems to be fine among the masses, despite decades of mismanagement and killing people.
That's not what this means.
AZ has genuinely fucked up a couple times. They accidentally gave some trial participants half the intended dose (https://www.bbc.com/news/health-55086927), and now appear to have made a mistake in reporting data.
They're procedural fuckups. Never should've happened, but neither one inherently says "the vaccine is unsafe".
That was an Oxford fuck up, as were most of the other early clinical trial ones as far as we know. As others have explained, this is not a normal small organization plus Big Pharma arrangement, and after the EU went crazy I'll bet AZ is now regretting ever getting involved.
AZ's catastrophic fuck up from that testing mistake which should have burned a lot of their credibility was to use that data which in the long term didn't pan out to make a blended claim of higher efficacy than they could at that time legitimately support.
The concerns about Sputnik are geopolitical in nature (weakening the sanctions regime against Russia for its doings in Ukraine, and the persecution of Navalny), not sanitary ones.
Not entirely. Their politicians boasted about it being the world's first "registered" vaccine a month before its Phase III trial started, that was an own goal completely of their making. It was only months later where they were able to finish their Phase III trial with very good results, but a few weeks behind the two mRNA vaccines.
That said, the effectiveness of Sputnik V has been established to Western standards now, so the only reason for the EU to refuse it when it is in crying need for vaccines is political, not scientific or medical.
Here in my country PM claimed to never accept Sputnik. Wonder what will happen if EU confirms it :)
[1] https://www.handelszeitung.ch/unternehmen/schweizer-biopharm...
The fact that, even when lives are at stake, companies cannot resist temptation, is why there are regulations. Try complaining about the regulations that were relaxed to allow this all to happen, however, and suddenly I'm an anti-vaxxer.