EU vaccine export row-please could someone explain?

[FlatteredRhubardFool]

In simple terms please
I'm confused as usual but I've not read very much about it to be honest. From what I've read the EU have put restrictions on exports of the vaccine that is being made in the EU. One of the places these restrictions apply to is Northern Ireland. Something about concerns over NI being used to distribute vaccines outside of the intended/allowed countries? This was to protect the supply within the EU.

Ive read some of the threads about this but I'm after facts not opinion so that I can get my head round what has happened and why.

Thank you!

Where exactly is the AZ vaccine being made? One place? Multiple places?

The AZ vaccine is being made in multiple places including the EU and the UK.

There were manufacturing problems at the UK plant last year, and EU capacity was used to supply the UK. Now there are issues at one(?) EU plant, and the EU understandably thinks that some of the shortfall should come from the UK.

That's the bare bones of it. Unless you're a contract lawyer qualified in Belgian law it's hard to know whether the EU has a legal right to their vaccine. My personal view is that when you are the regional regulator the fine details of the contract probably don't matter that much.

We don't know if the UK has a contract which gives them priority over U.K.-produced vaccine, which might effectively control or prevent exports from the UK. The key point here is that the EU suspects it does. So it is, in turn, imposing controls (not bans) on exports from the EU.

That seems to be the gist of it.

The EU has spent the last five years honking off about being a values-based organisation that has Ireland at the heart of its union, and that keeping the border not a border has been the fundamental tenet of its approach to Brexit.

A month later it throws Ireland under the bus at 8pm on a Friday night because the EC has fucked its vaccine purchase and the Irish government finds out about it on twitter.

I don't have a problem with naked power games because that it what nation states are for, but I do have a problem with crowing hypocrisy about values, solidarity, and peace and then unhesitatingly shit-canning the lot of it because VDL can't read a contract that she wrote, and looks really stupid.

The OP asked a really sensible and quite simple question.

No one benefits from naked and frankly hysterical politicisation of the issue.

Read Titchys explanation on a similar thread, it’s brilliant and very accurate.

The only way the EU would be able to have some sway with the UK re vaccines was, they thought, to put restrictions on the export of vaccines from them. So in theory they could hold back our already bought |Pfizer vaccines. Which from what I've read has major legal consequences. They couldn't use them themselves as that would be stealing.