3 ms·

There were no hard delivery requirements in any of AstraZeneca's contracts because they didn't have any way to guarantee how much they could deliver - the contr

by makomk 6y ago

There were no hard delivery requirements in any of AstraZeneca's contracts because they didn't have any way to guarantee how much they could deliver - the contract was literally to build the full-scale production lines, and they had no idea of the yield until those lines were actually built because messy biological processes are involved. The big problems with the EU's AZ purchase is that they bought less of it relative to their population than the UK (so had a commensurately reduced amount of production capacity allocated to them), signed the contract later (meaning less time to fix yield issues), and completely failed to grasp that signing a "best effort" contract for X units of a never-mass-produced vaccine on timescale Y didn't guarantee they'd be delivered on time. Like, the UK apparently only got something like a third the amount of AZ vaccine as expected by now in the initial contract and is more dependent on it than the EU, but you wouldn't even know there was a problem because the publicly-announced schedule was based on actual production numbers - and the UK contract had clauses with teeth to make sure AZ provided the information needed to make that possible. Not only that, the initial plans were ambitious enough that even after the main vaccine supplier underperformed hugely, the UK still ended up ahead of the EU despite most of their vaccines coming from suppliers who did perform as expected.

josefx 6y ago
What kind of "best effort" is signing five more delivery contracts when you aren't even sure that you can get the first few done? > Like, the UK apparently only got something like a third the amount of AZ vaccine as expected So just how far behind the expected production is AZ? The UK only got a third, the EU is months behind schedule and half a dozen other countries are just around the corner waiting to have their contracts fulfilled. > and the UK contract had clauses with teeth Yeah, that would require halfway competent politicians, not something you find in the EU.

by makomk 6y ago

josefx 6y ago

What kind of "best effort" is signing five more delivery contracts when you aren't even sure that you can get the first few done? > Like, the UK apparently only got something like a third the amount of AZ vaccine as expected So just how far behind the expected production is AZ? The UK only got a third, the EU is months behind schedule and half a dozen other countries are just around the corner waiting to have their contracts fulfilled. > and the UK contract had clauses with teeth Yeah, that would require halfway competent politicians, not something you find in the EU.