AstraZeneca EU-UK Vaccine Dispute

AZ is holding the vaccines for the UK and the EU is moaning about it: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-55822602

Right about USA. Wrong about UK.USA has effectively banned export. UK signed a better deal (https://www.politico.eu/article/the-key-differences-between-...), three months earlier, and as a result all AZ vaccine produced domestically in the UK is going to UK Citizens, and they are higher up the queue for AZ product manufactur

Those are the simple facts and they are pretty operative:- The UK signed months before- The EU has been slow to vaccinate independent of that AZ dispute- The EMA did only approve this vaccine (which the UK is already using) a few hours agoThis dispute has sadly been made into a hugely sensitive national dispute as a distraction from the poor performance of the EU's vaccination programme. Even if nothing had gone wrong with the AZ vaccine production, the EU still would have much

> This isn't really true for the AstraZeneca vaccine, though.It is (or was), AZ was to supply EU with 500M vaccines this year but changed that to 200M.EU got really served on the vaccine front, UK got more from AZ, US got more from Pfizer/Moderna (both have 3x more vaccinated than EU). And each transport that we ought to get is smaller or dalayed.I wouldn't be surprised if governments there blocked some of the vaccine export.I really hope that there will be a backsl

As far as I understand it, the EU member states are not generally short on doses, more on distribution and other regulatory issues. If they pause AZ, they can use something else which is already being manufactured right now, and likely within the EU, quelle surprise.I would not be surprised if this is simply a political and economic snub from the EU, one of very many the UK can expect over the coming decades.The UK has spent the last half decade ENDLESSLY trying to score points against th

Please check your facts:> If the EU had done the same with the Pfizer/BionTech vaccine, then the only countries with any vaccination success would have been the US, the EU, and whoever made a deal with either China or Russia (assuming efficacy there).Nope. The AZ vaccine has been massively deployed in the UK - I know because several members of my family had the AZ vaccine weeks ago and long before it was approved in the EU.> So, personally, I am glad that the EU did not follo

Nationalism? The Astrazeneca vaccines was paid for by the UK 3 months before the EU.Not 3 weeks, 3 months.The same production problems with the EU batch happened to the UK one, as far as I know, but they had time to fix it because of those extra 3 months.Now the EU want to jump the queue and give it out "evenly", because it suits them. And if the shoe was on the other foot, they'd be saying 'je suis desolé, we have no vaccine for you British because of Brexit'.

This seems exactly backwards. The EU's involvement in vaccine and PPE procurement was at least partially a propaganda exercise to try and undo the damage done when member states with more manufacturing capacity cut off the supply to other states with a more desperate immediate need like Italy and the EU was impotent to stop it. Which was a potential existential threat - the whole purpose of the EU was to encourage trade and interdependence between European states and ban them from using pro

This is very likely a political decision. AZ has not honoured their "best effort" contract obligations, the company priortized UK deliveries to honour their other contract and Western Europeans are reluctant to take it because it's less well tolerated than mRNA vaccines and now the very rare blood clot issues. It's too bad, because vaccination rollouts are well behind schedule with less than 10% or so of the EU population vaccinated, while the UK has vaccinated almost everyon

My understanding is that the EU just got unlucky that it was a manufacturing facility in Belgium that encountered problems in producing the vaccine, and AstraZeneca decided that the EU should be the only customers who should be inconvenienced by this problem.I don't know what contractual basis there is for demanding that the UK's supply be slowed in order to mitigate AstraZeneca's failure to meet its commitments to the EU, but there is at least a superficial logic to the idea t