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Comment by throwaway4good | Hacker News Reader

There is something weird going on with the AZ vaccine. One of things is that it is being sold at cost price at the moment.

AZ has the option of raising the price by this summer.

Now they wouldn't, would they, just stock pile the stuff until summer?

https://www.ft.com/content/c474f9e1-8807-4e57-9c79-6f4af145b...

AstraZeneca vaccine document shows limit of no-profit pledge

Company has right under contract to declare pandemic over by July 2021

AstraZeneca, which has promised not to profit from its Covid-19 vaccine “during the pandemic”, has the right to declare an end to the pandemic as soon as July 2021, according to an agreement with a manufacturer.

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AstraZeneca consistently makes more than $3B in net income every year, $5B last year.

EU paid 1.78€ per dose. Even if AstraZeneca loses money on every dose, let's say it costs them 20% more to produce, that's only some ~65M€ loss on the EU order. The hypothetical loss is a rounding error to their bottom line, while the damage already incurred to the brand image and goodwill is colossal.

I highly doubt that "right under contract to declare pandemic over by July 2021" is legally valid.

The article in the NY times regarding what the NIH said yesterday seems very odd. Even Dr. Fauci was not happy with it as seems quite unusually for procedural errors to be made public in such a way.

Wouldn't AstraZeneca be still required to deliver the orders at the price that it was agreed?

IIRC, most of the EU, has already ordered enough vaccines for the whole population.

The fact that you've pointed out, still doesn't still well with me though. If most developed countries will already have been vaccinated, are they trying to take the profit from developing economies instead?

It's likely that even if the pandemic is over vaccination still will need to be done for years to come (to prevent a new pan-/epidemic).

It's also likely that people on all sides of the contract thought that it will be more or less over at that point in time and the clause exists solely to prevent governments from just never declaring the pandemic from being over.

I also doubt that a clause like that is actually legal, tbh.

But hey maybe I'm just to optimistic.

> Wouldn't AstraZeneca be still required to deliver the orders at the price that it was agreed?

Well, yes, but presumably if they take long enough then EU vaccination will be done and the contract will just be cancelled. The EU has ordered enough to dose something like 800 million people, so if manufacturers are amenable at least some contracts _will_ be terminated early down the line.

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