Hacker News Reader

Comment by hef19898 | Hacker News Reader

hef19898

How is AZ incompetent? On other aspects than PR, that is. Their vaccine is working, it is sufficiently effective by anyones standard. That mRNA vaccines turned out to be better is great, but it was not sure a year ago.

View on HN

They failed to deliver and respect the contract with the EU. This and what their CEO said about the differences in contracts between UK and EU (timing and best efforts - while the differences did not justify the different treatment). They cared so little about PR that some science communicators (like Burioni in Italy) stopped to defend the AZ vaccine because of the total lack of statements and communications from AZ, even if they have a positive opinion about the vaccine itself.

Well, my interpretation is that AZ did, in fact, not violate the EU contract. The contract states "best effort", not penalties and even redemnifies AZ from delivery delays in case these delays are caused by additional orders from the EU. And guess what the EU did, IMHO mainly to media and public pressure, earlier this year.

Given the bad press AZ got, reverting to a "no comment" strategy is not such a bad idea. Anything they say will be used against them anyway.

"Best effort" has a specific meaning in a contract, which is different from everyday use; this is why AZ could still be found in violation of the contract. This does not change the fact they have been unable to deliver by a huge margin and informed the UE with a short notice.

A company that just avoid commenting on issues your product could have or misinformation regarding it does not seem a company that cares about that. Hard for me that they had a good PR strategy.

I wrote drafts and analyzed procurement contracts for smaller volumes and less critical parts before. Of course with legal support. And all these contracts included initial delivery schedules (as an annex), delivery SLAs and penalties. And they were all considerably longer than the AZ contractthat was published. Fun fact, they didn't sacrifice 5 pages to talk about the order form.

The AZ contract has none of that. Ultimately, it would need a court to decide that. Once the point of discusing contract terms, the relation ship between supplier and customer is already ruined.

Good :) So you know what the contract and "best effort" mean and the kind of forces driving both parties. "customer is already ruined": that is why they would probably EU will not go to a court but it just ordered 50 M vaccines from Pfizer, while rumours of the EU not renewing the contract with AZ are getting stronger (some EU/EEA countries have plans to move forward without it).

I just see a bad behaviour and PR from AZ. That and having a CEO that says that UK got it first because of the "best effort" clause when both UK and EU contracts have does not seem very professional to me IMHO. I am not sure why that happened.

I think incompetent is harsh, but they had a bad data submission and also a dosing error. Neither is a good look. Neither ended up being a big problem but they could’ve been.

Yeah, that was an issue. I cannot tell how much of an issue, because I have zero experience with medical trials. As do most people, I assume, getting upset about that. Regardless, AZ got approval in the UK and from EMA in the EU. And these entities job is clinical trial assessment.

Unless I am going to refuse any and all drugs and medical treatment, I will have to trust e.g. EMA that the stuff I take when being sick is safe and working as intended.

I’ve got a little bit of FDA experience, but of course no COVID-19 EUA experience. Based on what we submitted to the FDA and the comments we received, I would personally think it most likely there were many issues with AZ’s materials, at least as far as their attempts to seek approval from the FDA went.

A good heuristic for how big/rare of a problem would be to try to find another instance of NIAID publicly scolding a company seeking approval. Doesn't happen.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com