EU preparing legal case against AstraZeneca over vaccine shortfalls (opens in new tab)

> UK where politicians wrapped the vaccine in union jack and hitched it to Brexit bandwagon for jignoistic reasons

Something I have learnt from the whole AZ business is how much media bias affects your thought process, even on topics which appear to be reported relatively neutrally.

Here in the UK, the implicit messaging I've picked up from the media is that EU politicians have been briefing against AZ in order to discredit Brexit. One (fairly similar) country over, and you've received entirely the opposite message.

In my opinion, the media and European politicians are responsible for this vaccine skepticism. You reap what you sow.

The politicians banned the vaccine despite there not being scientific evidence to suggest that was a reasonable choice. The media in Europe hyped this up massively.

In the UK, neither of these things happened, and despite there being some degree of skepticism, the vast majority of people are still willing to have the AZ jab.

> To be honest here in Ireland where majority of vaccinations have been Pfizer people seemed to stop caring about AZ

That's the case now that Pfizer supply has been ramped up, but our vaccine program would be far more progressed if AZ had delivered. Ireland was supposed to get about 1 million AZ doses in Q1, 3 million by end of Q2. Actual number delivered so far is more like 300k.

It's split: Hesitation is for sure here, on the other hand plenty people in age ranges its not recommended for here decide to get it anyways. (Here in Germany its not recommended for <60, but not forbidden to be used)

But the other vaccines also slightly elevate the chance of blood clotting. To less than the elevation caused by the contraceptive pill.

I'm still waiting too see long term effects of all adenovirus based vaccines. I'm kinda estimating there to be an increased risk of strokes overall.

But I'm constantly baffled at Germany's vaccine response. Remember that Pfizer's vaccine is developed by the German company and that the president of the European commission used to be Germany's Minister of Family/Labour and Defense.

But in a way that's a result of their arrogance, so well deserved in a way.

EDIT: Wow, the responses are seriously out of this world. The German health minister fumbled ordering fast testing kits. In fact Aldi, Germany's biggest cheap supermarket chain started distributing testing kits faster than the German government[1].

They fumbled through the mask ordering and distribution and by inventing a super complicated voucher that was delayed many times to allow for cheap masks[2].

One of Germanies most important health care organizations leaderships told people to make sure they know there is no mask mandate in the office[3], and that a running nose is not a reason to stay home. This is while there were statewide mask mandates and work at home encouragement elsewhere.

You're right that it doesn't matter where BioNtech is from. What does matter however is that they are considered more safe than any of the other vaccines, and that they delivered hundreds of millions of vaccines to the US and elsewhere.

Let's stop pretending that Germany didn't fumbled through every step of the pandemic, they bought AZ because it was cheap not out of solidarity to the US. They made the rules for the EU and are now looking at AZ as the scapegoat.

Did you guys already forget the Luca app nightmare?

[1] https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-health-minister-jens...

[2] https://tkare.de/en/berechtigungsschein-the-new-voucher-for-...

[3] https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2021-04/kassenaerztl...

Where do you get that from? There's a huge effort to scale up the production up, which you can see by the weekly increasing output for example of Biontech [0]. Discussing one thing doesn't exclude taking care of another.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-bionte...

Arguments over AZ production feckups and vaccine exports stopped weeks ago. And billions have been poured instead into producing mRNA vaccines not just for europe but for the world. The article is about pursuing AZ in courts, its aim is not to increase supply of AZ vaccine which increasingly people are refusing to accept when they know there are (what may or may not be) better alternatives

> rather than about increasing manufacturing capacity?

They have looked into increasing supply (see the kerfuffle about the Halix plant) but in the end it seems that the process AZ is using scales poorly. (Not sure how many were produced by the SII, probably not much more than that)

I think AZ delivered approx. 25Mi to the UK and 30Mi to the EU. Compare with Pfizer who delivered somewhere close to 300Mi doses already.

It has, and Pfizer and Biontec in particular have scaled up production quite effectively (delivering more than originally committed). AstraZeneca is fairly dramatically behind on production (delivered about 33% of commitments in the EU so far), and at this point it feels like the European Commission has basically abandoned it; its contract is apparently not getting renewed.

I don't know any details, but my understanding if that manufacturing vaccines is quite difficult.

Increasing manufacturing capacity is happening. BioNTech as the most important producer in Europe has brought multiple additional partners into production as well as an entire new plant, which by itself is churning out 1 billion doses per year when fully operational (they're still scaling up production there AFAIK, but have been shipping doses from there since April). Also, the CureVac vaccine is expected to be authorized in the near future, and manufacturing capacity for that one is being prepared right now, also through manufacturing partnerships within Europe.

But the thing is: while EU agencies like the EMA are involved in these processes, and also monetary grants to finance production increases have been provided in several cases, the EU has a limited number of actions available to "increase manufacturing capacity", especially in the short term (the new BioNTech plant for example was already bought in September, so it took over half a year to get it retrofitted for production). We cannot simply - like the US or UK - declare that everything produced within the EU stays within the EU, with no exceptions. Or well, technically we could, and that would certainly increase the supply in the EU in the short term, but that would have geopolitical repercussions that might in the worst case damage the EU's vaccine production in the long term (because it is at least partially dependent on pre-products sourced from outside the EU), but will for sure cause a lot of damage in international relations. The EU is effectively the world's biggest vaccine exporter in terms of doses, especially when you focus on the mRNA vaccines which have the highest efficacy and least complications and are thus the most sought-after. Limited to just that class of vaccines, the EU even is the single relevant source right now.

The epic fuck-up of the EU body that was responsible for ordering the vaccines in the first place might in the end turn out to be a bad thing for us EU citizens because of slower vaccination, but a good thing for geopolitical relations/tensions as a whole. That's because this fuck-up kind of deters the EU from taking the same isolationist "our citizens first" stance that the US took - politically such a move would now clearly be regarded as a cheap and, most importantly, illegitimate attempt to fix the failure of negotiating proper and broad supply contracts with manufacturers using brute political force, and that effectively stops the EU from taking this step, even if it would technically be a possibility. As a result, all the countries in the world without significant mRNA vaccine production capabilities on their territories at least have realistic access to a single source for their imports, as long as they negotiated supply contracts with the manufacturers early enough. This situation has for example been the key enabler for the huge success of the Israeli's highly acclaimed vaccination campaign, which was powered by vaccine supply from Europe.

There are groups which advocate for that, but they often don't have a large (if any) representation.

I don't understand how you could possibly call this an attempt at plan economy, unless you consider all solicitation of a product by a government to be plan economy?

How is this fundamentally any different from the US's purchasing of doses from BioNTech/Pfizer? I'm sure the US would take legal action against Pfizer if they weren't delivering doses according to the agreement?

As far as I understand it the levels of what “mandatory” mean were different in the Uk contract to the eu one. So it’s not quite true that that’s always the point, there are shades of gray which is exactly where this went wrong.

> The point of a contract is always that fulfilling the contract is mandatory.

This is true of almost zero contracts.

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I honestly don't understand your comment.

"we shall fight them on the beaches" is war-time motivational speech. We live in peace-time (in Europe at least). In a stable, peace-time society, disputes are solved in courts.

Just look at how the "leaders" in place got there. Backroom deals instead of elections. Von der Leyen did not achieve a single thing in her career except for hiring consultants.

Our politicians are mostly lawyers, the job they and their staff do is all about laws. And even at that they suck, as is evident by the long list of laws they pass which are then denied by the supreme courts as unconstitutional.

We still don't have a good way of finding the best leaders and putting them in the potions where they are most effective, neither in politics nor in the economy (although there are positive examples of people and mechanisms in both).

I think we are super complacent with our representative democracy and we are failing to develop it further and make it better.

> There's almost no "we shall fight them on the beaches" or "not because they are easy but because they are hard" and way more process, lawsuits, committees, etc.

Are you... suggesting dealing with AZ's failure to deliver by storming their offices, or something? Like, what is the actual actionable thing that the EC should be doing here, other than legal action?

> The quality of leadership has really declined. Western countries seem to be run exclusively by petty managers.

Most Western countries are either run by Conservatives (as their voters don't vote for the Conservatives but rather against "communists") or by populists who rose to power because people were fed up too much (e.g. Macron, BoJo).

The problem with voting for a party only because the other party is worse is that it places no pressure on the "not as bad" party to improve and keep themselves accountable.

Another cause, especially in Eastern Europe with Hungary's Orban but also in Germany with BILD or Fox "News" in the US, is media that is either directly controlled or massively influenced by government politics. A constant barrage of propaganda will always keep voters for the Conservative parties.

I bet a lot of people will hate to hear that but I think the morale of the story is "Don't overpromise and underdeliver".

The moral of the story is, don't contract to deliver 100 million widgets in a quarter and then actually deliver 30 million widgets. It's pretty simple; remove the vaccine context and there's nothing at all controversial going on here.

Missing production forecasts is one thing, but missing them by this much is unusual and will usually result in trouble for the manufacturer.

Really, I'd say it's more the case that Oxford is regretting working with AZ, rather than a more established vaccine manufacturer.

High risks, high rewards?

Apples vs oranges comparison you made, they probably given indemnity in case of unknown sideefects as other vaccines were given in europe, us etc

This seems to be a contractual dispute.

So, it's totally possible that the EU isn't doing enough to approve alternative vaccines, I don't know.

But dude, the EU is huge. They're capable of pursuing multiple avenues at once. I don't understand why they shouldn't try to get more doses from AZ _at the same time as_ trying to approve and procure vaccines from other sources. It's not one or the other.

I am not sure where you currently are, so maybe I misunderstand the question. Sorry if that's the case.

> there is _no_ news about it

There is regular news about Biontech/Pfitzer in Germany. Including additional deliveries based on eu negotiations [1] and it needing yearly refreshments [2].

Further, the vaccine distribution in germany is like this [3]:

Biontech 18mio

AZ 6mio

Moderna 1.8mio

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/de/statem...

[2] https://www.n-tv.de/panorama/Biontech-braucht-wohl-jaehrlich...

[3] https://impfdashboard.de

The main problem with the Pfizer vaccine is that there is not enough of it. The government of my country gladly orders any Pfizer doses that are offered, but it's not enough. People here generally favor the Pfizer vaccine over the AstraZeneca vaccine, given all the bad press of the latter. Pfizer is very well known and desirable, that's not the problem.

AstraZeneca on the other hand promised plentiful quantities, and my country made plans based on those promises, but AstraZeneca failed to deliver. I guess the EU feels screwed over.

There are a couple, Moderna, Pfizer/Biontech, Johnson&Johnson, AZ and Curevac (soon to be approved as it seems). AZ is the cheapest one (Oxford has them selling at cost so far) and was seen as the most promising last summer.

AZ is getting a shit loaf of bad press, so everything AZ related is "news".

All vaccines are effective and working, Pfizer as well as AZ.

I can't remember exact values but my guess is this friction comes from the price point.

AZ was negotiated at something like less than 2 euros per shot for EU markets, and the Pfizer contracts varied wildly for different countries but it was negotiated at about 15 euros per shot for EU.

With my cynical hat on if you are having to vaccinate millions that order of magnitude difference probably matters.

What I haven't seen anyone discuss at the EC level is what would be the maths of just paying premium Israel prices for the Pfizer vaccine?

Would the economic benefits of get out of this mess as quickly as possible outweigh the extra euros per shot spent on vaccination. My guess is it would likely pay off but then again I am not a European Commissioner.

What? The Biontech-vaccine is mentioned all the time in news about vaccination progress and vaccine distribution. I really wonder how you could have gotten the impression that it isn't used.

Turkish immigrants were welcomed into the country, selectively, with a planned system and for job vacancies.

Today’s immigrants are illegally crossing borders and refusing to register at the first non-hostile country. They are not using official channels, or even legal systems.

I’d just like to point out that difference since you bought the racism card into the debate competely unnecessarily.

Eh? Most vaccines being used in Germany, and everywhere else in Europe, are pfizer/biontec. AZ accounts for maybe 25% of supply and dropping.