A really interesting, calm interview with the head of AstraZeneca

[HelloThereMeHearties]

This is really worth reading, to shed some light on the whole sorry EU vaccine mess. It's in English.

Also really interesting about the mechanics of vaccine rollout.

www.repubblica.it/cronaca/2021/01/26/news/interview_pascal_soriot_ceo_astrazeneca_coronavirus_covid_vaccines-284349628/

A German newspaper does not equal the EU. That's like saying the Daily Mirror speaks for the UK govt.

The bullying tactics of the EU look terrible though, why make it so public?

Political pressure IMO - the EU have screwed up big time, they need to be seen to be taking action and fast.

The EU are making it public because they are getting absolutely slated in some EU countries with some being so desperate they are buying the Russian Sputnik vaccine which has not been tested to internationally recognised standards. So they are doing what they normally do which is bully, bluster and lay the blame elsewhere

Surely they can't use a vaccine that hasn't been properly tested? That's awful. What a fucking mess.

@Dongdingdong

The EU are making it public because they are getting absolutely slated in some EU countries with some being so desperate they are buying the Russian Sputnik vaccine which has not been tested to internationally recognised standards. So they are doing what they normally do which is bully, bluster and lay the blame elsewhere

Surely they can't use a vaccine that hasn't been properly tested? That's awful. What a fucking mess.

It's only Hungary at the moment and many counties (outside the EU) have approved and are using the Sputnik vaccine.

A doctor told me that the Russians don't publish as much peer review data thats why many don't like it. It's still properly tested. Not sure if thats all true or not. However I wouldn't be my first choice.

Financial Times correspondent on Radio 4 just now (a pro-EU paper).

Says EU has had bad luck but has also made bad decisions. It has no right to ask for UK supplies or vaccine. Astra has done nothing wrong, neither has UK.

But EU, coming under pressure from member states, is blaming first Pfizer, now Astra Zenaca - anyone but itself.

Supplies that were made in the EU, and already paid for by the EU were sent to the UK in December in order to cover the shortfall there:

www.irishtimes.com/business/health-pharma/supply-of-covid-vaccine-doses-held-up-by-manufacturing-delays-1.4430676?mode=amp

Now the EU are bring told that they, and only they, will suffer major shortages, while knowing that stock they paid for was sent to the UK. So it's hardly surprising, or unreasonable, that they're asking for those doses to be made available now.

Still can't see how it's the EU's fault that Astrazeneca over promised, under delivered and didn't communicate their supply issues until the 11th hour.

@wfhconfusion

It will depend entirely on the terms of the contracts though. If the U.K. supply took precedence because that contract was signed first and required that the U.K. were supplied first (and the EU contract had less favourable terms because it was signed later) then it is what it is to an extent.

Obviously we don't know the detail of the contractual arrangements so it's all speculation to an extent. I'm a lawyer and I feel for whoever did the drafting right now, I bet they're having sleepless nights!

Absolutely it depends on the contract.

The EU say that the advanced purchase agreement specifically lists four supply plants, including the two UK plants. So the claim that only the EU factory can supply the EU, and only the UK factories can supply the UK, is new to them.

They are very keen to publish the contract, but they can't do that without AstraZeneca's approval. If AZ have nothing to hide, surely they should agree to this?

I'd be very interested to see it but I can also understand from a commercial point of view AZ not wanting details of their contractual arrangements published. Presumably the contract contains confidentiality provisions that both parties agreed to when the contract was entered into. If AZ are in breach it's open to the EU to take legal action, I'm sure they could get a court date fairly quickly!

@wfhconfusion

But Sakura, the AZ jab being used in the UK is being made in Britain.

The EU is asking for transparency, because it appears that vaccines produced in the EU for the EU market were diverted to the UK. And now the EU is being told that they, and only they, will have their supply reduced. It's natural that there's anger there, but talk of export bans is over the top. The point is transparency.

Clearly not read the article 🤦‍♀️

It gives me the hope I so badly needed

It's all very interesting, but obviously no one has seen both contracts other than AZ, so really who knows. I would be VERY surprised if the CEO didn't have a strong basis for this - he will have had lawyers crawling all over the agreements weeks ago before breaking the bad news to the EU, so the relevant clauses should have been very well studied.

Clearly, "best endeavours" could mean lots of things in this context. In English law, it doesn't require you to break a binding legal commitment with someone else to deliver something where you are legally committed to that third party to do so (ie not best endeavours), so if that is what the U.K. has, it does get priority over "best endeavours" to someone else. Whether the EU understood this at the time (although clearly Soriot suggests that it was understood that the game plan was that supplies would be made from a continental factory at least initially) is a clearly a live issue. The export of vaccines to the U.K. from the EU factory is an interesting one - I have no idea whether they decided they needed to go to the U.K. because the EU hadn't approved the vaccine yet and there might be storage/distribution issues or whether this looks more like a breach in retrospect because they couldn't deliver to the EU - 4m doses was quite significant to the U.K. obviously, but not so much to the EU really, so it isn't that relevant to the main issue at hand in terms of the delays on the wider contract.

I am a remainer and have no real beef with the EU (from my dealings with them as a lawyer, it is pretty bureaucratic and needs reform, but I thought it was far better to stay in and try to advocate from the inside) but I do have limited sympathy for a party who really took their time and invested less in order not to take the risk of backing a loser (but backed the french vaccine anyway for political reasons) and then expects to be able to obtain the same level of priority. Risk and reward are usually linked. But sympathy is not really relevant - it is the terms of the contract that really count. We just don't know!

@whenwillsantagetvaccinated

It's all very interesting, but obviously no one has seen both contracts other than AZ, so really who knows. I would be VERY surprised if the CEO didn't have a strong basis for this - he will have had lawyers crawling all over the agreements weeks ago before breaking the bad news to the EU, so the relevant clauses should have been very well studied.

Clearly, "best endeavours" could mean lots of things in this context. In English law, it doesn't require you to break a binding legal commitment with someone else to deliver something where you are legally committed to that third party to do so (ie not best endeavours), so if that is what the U.K. has, it does get priority over "best endeavours" to someone else. Whether the EU understood this at the time (although clearly Soriot suggests that it was understood that the game plan was that supplies would be made from a continental factory at least initially) is a clearly a live issue. The export of vaccines to the U.K. from the EU factory is an interesting one - I have no idea whether they decided they needed to go to the U.K. because the EU hadn't approved the vaccine yet and there might be storage/distribution issues or whether this looks more like a breach in retrospect because they couldn't deliver to the EU - 4m doses was quite significant to the U.K. obviously, but not so much to the EU really, so it isn't that relevant to the main issue at hand in terms of the delays on the wider contract.

I am a remainer and have no real beef with the EU (from my dealings with them as a lawyer, it is pretty bureaucratic and needs reform, but I thought it was far better to stay in and try to advocate from the inside) but I do have limited sympathy for a party who really took their time and invested less in order not to take the risk of backing a loser (but backed the french vaccine anyway for political reasons) and then expects to be able to obtain the same level of priority. Risk and reward are usually linked. But sympathy is not really relevant - it is the terms of the contract that really count. We just don't know!

Completely agree!

@Baileysforchristmas

We’ll have to wait and see. There will have to be a compromise somewhere even if legally AZ don’t have to. The bullying tactics of the EU look terrible though, why make it so public? Why not just deal with AZ quietly without the big threats? Why did a German newspaper make statements about how ineffective it was before checking facts? It has put the EU in a very bad light.

Because of us. Because they can't bear that the UK is steaming ahead with vaccines, and also produced one of the successful vaccines.

[quote MarieG10]@MintyMabel
"The MHRA has had the good fortune to be working side by side with the EMA (based in London) allowing it to tap in to the best knowledge in the continent."

That's rubbish. The EMA was moved to Holland after the Brexit vote. I understand though that some of their staff stayed and moved to the MRHA. It was originally based in London as many of the experts the EMA needed to attract are typically English speakers and they are having that problem now in Holland in struggling to get the expertise [/quote]
The EMA was previously in London because of the MHRA. It's a world-leading organisation, and the EU - as we have discovered - don't have anything to match it.

The EMA was previously in London because of the MHRA. It's a world-leading organisation, and the EU - as we have discovered - don't have anything to match it.

Again, a misinterpretation. But you carry on if it makes you feel superior.

Because of us. Because they can't bear that the UK is steaming ahead with vaccines, and also produced one of the successful vaccines.

No, it's about getting the supplies that were paid for in order to vaccinate EU citizens. It's not about the UK.

Clearly not read the article

I have, but it only gives one side of the story and there's clearly a real dispute here.

@whenwillsantagetvaccinated excellent post

I suspect the EU asking for the contract to be released is political grandstanding. They know there will be commercially sensitive information in the contract that AZ won't share with the world. In addition, none of the CMOs making the vaccine for AZ will want their contracts in the public domain and if AZ has also increased their own capacity and thinking long term about doing contract manufacturing in the future they won't want future customers to know their costs (no profit contract = actual costs).

I work in this field (not for AZ). From the information in the OP's link it sounds like the yield issues are exactly the type of issues you'd expect to see when transferring a not very robust process to multiple sites, all of which will have differences in their equipment (things that can affect yield: cell line, shape of bioreactor, shape of the stirrer, shape of the tube that supplies gasses, some media components vary from batch to batch, etc etc). It's very standard to have 'best endeavours' clauses and to promise a set number of batches a year, never doses because of precisely this kind of reason. Sometimes it works well for both the manufacturer and customer if you can optimise a process and consistently get high yield. The drop in yield AZ has seen between sites is larger than average but they've taken on a bit of a poison chalice. Oxford's vaccine technology is cutting edge but large scale manufacture needs robust processes and AZ have had to take Oxford's process (which will have been developed without any thought to manufacturing robustness, that's not something you can expect the immunologists to know about) and have had minimum time to develop it, I suspect they got rid of any absolutely unscaleable parts of the process and have then had to go ahead and manufacture asap with a flakey process while (hopefully) doing process development alongside to improve things longer term.

@Peaseblossom22

The U.K. had already, before the pandemic, started establishing the infrastructure as part of research into a vaccine against SARS and Ebola so the Oxford vaccine was able to piggyback on this .

The no profit agreement is based on the cost of production. In the U.K. higher costs of production were agreed for a variety of reasons, if things had gone badly they would no be being castigated for paying too much . The EU seems to be implying that AZ are supplying the U.K. , and the US incidentally, because they paid more per dose and therefore making an underhand profit but the price is higher because the cost is higher than the EU were prepared to invest.

I think AZ are justifiably very cross about this allegation when they have agreed to supply the world at cost .

The EU specified lower production costs so that they could pay a lower price per dose . €330m is pretty low for the production levels needed. By all accounts they drove a very hard bargain , which is fine but if you do that you have a lot less margin of error if things go wrong.

It pains me to say it because I really loathe this government but in this case they have, possibly unwittingly, actually gambled and won.

Do you have a source for your information about EU signing a deal that cuts production costs in order to get the cost down? It's an interesting approach if true but very very complicated and very high risk! Normally that type of procurement is in well established supply chains for eg car manufacturing.

Such an interesting thread, and the subject matter is so volatile.

This could spark huge issues across the eu.
Massive massive massive yellow stone park volcano 🌋 size repercussions...

Fascinating article & thread comments.

Really just hoping the other vaccines speed up & the world can get vaccinated to help diminish the threat of worse mutations

@roses2 it is a matter of public record that the agreement that AZ have with Oxford University about non profit is based on the cost. The price charged varies on the cost basis, this is referred to in the article quoted above . It is has also been widely reported that the EU negotiated hard to keep the price down, if the price equals cost then obviously negotiating the price down means pressure to keep costs down.

@JaninaDuszejko

Exactly! A contract like this would not be a guaranteed number of doses.

Since AZ was producing at cost for customers, and the EU defined the costs they were willing to pay for a targeted amount, it was in essence the EU who specified a weak manufacturing and supply chain. They bargained to take more risk in return for cheaper doses.