Current Affairs Coronavirus Thread - Serious stuff !!!

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tsubaki said:
This support of AstraZeneca over this is a really bizarre step for people to take; they’ve clearly signed some sort of deal with the EU and are clearly not delivering what that deal related to.

The only issue seems to be that AZ think the deal only aspired to deliver the amount, not legally guaranteed it. I’d have thought if anyone did that to any one of us, we’d be rightly outraged.
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I agree with you on this definitely. But leaking false information to the media about a company you want to do business with might not have been the most sensible move.
 
tsubaki said:
This support of AstraZeneca over this is a really bizarre step for people to take; they’ve clearly signed some sort of deal with the EU and are clearly not delivering what that deal related to.

The only issue seems to be that AZ think the deal only aspired to deliver the amount, not legally guaranteed it. I’d have thought if anyone did that to any one of us, we’d be rightly outraged.
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So is supporting what the EU commission have done, really.

Luckily, it's nothing to do with the UK government in terms of the deal with the EU. There's no need for the UK to get involved at all, other than when the time comes, to obviously allow AZ to ship to Europe from the UK plant(s), which is what will happen as it is in the agreement.

As AZ's CEO stated, and he quoted from the contract, the deal said "best effort." The EU don't seem to have denied that, they just seem to be arguing the semantics (probably a fair position to take, like), and also demanded that the UK plant start to send out doses to Europe - which until the UK have had the 100million doses that they ordered three months before the EU ordered their dosage, isn't going to happen, as that was part of the UK and AZ's signed contract.

Now surely the EU had enough lawyers and top negotiators to know that that 'best effort' didn't leave them protected? The Commission also demanding that they receive doses at the same time as the UK, even though they signed the contract three months later, is clearly unrealistic as the months of delay are going to have set them back in terms of production (or 'scaling up' as the AZ CEO called it)?

You say that we'd be outraged, but come on, you know full well that loads of posters in here, including yourself probably, would dig into the Tories (and rightly so) if they signed a deal with a manufacturer that only promised a 'best effort'.

They've cocked up. Not just with AZ, but the bureaucracy has also, to the frustration of Germany, delayed the Pfizer roll out until the very end of December where it could easily have been done a few weeks earlier to no adverse impact.

While I agree with you that it's fair for them to be miffed at AZ, for them to have made so many demands, when a huge part of the delay was down to the Commission's delay and taking control of the deal away from Germany, Netherlands, Italy and France, I don't really see how anybody can defend that decision either, and if the UK government did that to add to their many sins, then they'd be getting slaughtered
 
BlueToff said:
So is supporting what the EU commission have done, really.

Luckily, it's nothing to do with the UK government in terms of the deal with the EU. There's no need for the UK to get involved at all, other than when the time comes, to obviously allow AZ to ship to Europe from the UK plant(s), which is what will happen as it is in the agreement.

As AZ's CEO stated, and he quoted from the contract, the deal said "best effort." The EU don't seem to have denied that, they just seem to be arguing the semantics (probably a fair position to take, like), and also demanded that the UK plant start to send out doses to Europe - which until the UK have had the 100million doses that they ordered three months before the EU ordered their dosage, isn't going to happen, as that was part of the UK and AZ's signed contract.

Now surely the EU had enough lawyers and top negotiators to know that that 'best effort' didn't leave them protected? The Commission also demanding that they receive doses at the same time as the UK, even though they signed the contract three months later, is clearly unrealistic as the months of delay are going to have set them back in terms of production (or 'scaling up' as the AZ CEO called it)?

You say that we'd be outraged, but come on, you know full well that loads of posters in here, including yourself probably, would dig into the Tories (and rightly so) if they signed a deal with a manufacturer that only promised a 'best effort'.

They've cocked up. Not just with AZ, but the bureaucracy has also, to the frustration of Germany, delayed the Pfizer roll out until the very end of December where it could easily have been done a few weeks earlier to no adverse impact.

While I agree with you that it's fair for them to be miffed at AZ, for them to have made so many demands, when a huge part of the delay was down to the Commission's delay and taking control of the deal away from Germany, Netherlands, Italy and France, I don't really see how anybody can defend that decision either, and if the UK government did that to add to their many sins, then they'd be getting slaughtered
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This just reads like a whole load of words to excuse away the fact that AZ promised something it hadn’t delivered though.

Yes, the EU messed up with this as it has with the virus generally, but when one party in a commercial agreement does what AZ have done here then the focus has to be on them.

As for “best effort”, in be really wonders how secure a legal basis that is if they’ve left the whole of Europe dependent on one plant.
 
tsubaki said:
This support of AstraZeneca over this is a really bizarre step for people to take; they’ve clearly signed some sort of deal with the EU and are clearly not delivering what that deal related to.

The only issue seems to be that AZ think the deal only aspired to deliver the amount, not legally guaranteed it. I’d have thought if anyone did that to any one of us, we’d be rightly outraged.
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Brexit rule Britannia mob and it's overtones is strong on this, just let them gratify and froff themselves.
 
tsubaki said:
This support of AstraZeneca over this is a really bizarre step for people to take; they’ve clearly signed some sort of deal with the EU and are clearly not delivering what that deal related to.

The only issue seems to be that AZ think the deal only aspired to deliver the amount, not legally guaranteed it. I’d have thought if anyone did that to any one of us, we’d be rightly outraged.
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He's a vaccine nationalist.
 
tsubaki said:
This just reads like a whole load of words to excuse away the fact that AZ promised something it hadn’t delivered though.

Yes, the EU messed up with this as it has with the virus generally, but when one party in a commercial agreement does what AZ have done here then the focus has to be on them.

As for “best effort”, in be really wonders how secure a legal basis that is if they’ve left the whole of Europe dependent on one plant.
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They haven't left the whole of Europe dependent on one plant.

It's explained in the article - I've extracted the bits which relate to it.

Mr Pascal Soriot, CEO of AstraZeneca, why hasn't AstraZeneca been more specific on detailing the supply problem detected on its European plants? What exactly is the problem?
“I think we have been relatively specific with the information. Of course, we are all very disappointed. We would like to produce more. I think we will deliver up to Europe in the month of February a reasonable quantity actually, very similar to what others have delivered on a monthly basis. But of course, it's less than expected and also because our vaccine is easy to use people expected more so we could scale up. Our team is working 24/7 to fix the very much issues of production of the vaccine itself. You have two steps in the production of a vaccine: one is you produce the vaccine itself. We call it a drug substance, the vaccine. Then, when we are finished with it, we move this into different plants where we put the vaccine into vials and we call that the drug product, the final product. For Europe the drugs substance is essentially produced in two plants, one in the Netherlands, one in Belgium. The drug product is actually produced in Italy and Germany. So from a drug product viewpoint, we have full capacity. We have zero problem. The current problems have to do with manufacturing the drugs substance.

“So maybe I need to give you a little bit of explanation as to how we manufacture those vaccines. Essentially, we have cell cultures, big batches, 1000-litre or 2000-litre batches. We have cell cultures inside those batches and we inject them with the virus, the vaccine, if you will. Then those cells produce the vaccine, it’s a biotechnology protection. Now, some of those batches have very high yield and others have low yield. Particularly in Europe, we had one site with large capacity that experienced yield issues. So it's essentially a question of when you scale up to the level we are scaling up to - something like this that's never been done. We are scaling up to hundreds of millions, billions of doses of vaccines at a very high speed.

"In the US, we also have issues of yield and essentially our engineers have worked with our partners to identify what the issues are. We believe we have sorted out the issues now. The issues are different, for instance, in Belgium: we believe it was more a question of downstream filtering because when you finish making the vaccine, you have to filter it. When you filter it, you put it into vials. Our partner in Australia for instance also had yield issues. And they have been in the vaccine business for 20 years. But it's complicated, especially in the early phase where you have to really kind of sort out all sorts of issues. We believe we've sorted out those issues, but we are basically two months behind where we wanted to be. We've had also teething issues like this in the UK supply chain. But the UK contract was signed three months before the European vaccine deal. So with the UK we have had an extra three months to fix all the glitches we experienced. As for Europe, we are three months behind in fixing those glitches. Would I like to do better? Of course. But, you know, if we deliver in February what we are planning to deliver, it's not a small volume. We are planning to deliver millions of doses to Europe, it is not small”.

You keep saying AZ made a commitment, but AZ are denying that they made that 'commitment' - that set in stone, we will 100% guarantee these doses. The EU, if they aren't denying that, which as far as I can tell they aren't, and imagine how much bother the AZ CEO would be in if he misquoted the contract, left themselves ridiculously open to something like this happening and, as explained, the Commission's demands and insistence on renegotiating a deal which needed no renegotiating increased the risk of that happening.

Here's some more on that above bit.

Anyway, we didn't commit with the EU, by the way. It's not a commitment we have to Europe: it’s a best effort, we said we are going to make our best effort.
The reason why we said that is because Europe at the time wanted to be supplied more or less at the same time as the UK, even though the contract was signed three months later. So we said, “ok, we're going to do our best, we’re going to try, but we cannot commit contractually because we are three months behind UK”. We knew it was a super stretch goal and we know it's a big issue, this pandemic. But our contract is not a contractual commitment. It's a best effort. Basically we said we're going to try our best, but we can't guarantee we're going to succeed. In fact, getting there, we are a little bit delayed”.

“I don't want to give judgment on anything that has been said. I can only tell you what's in their contract. And the contract is very clear. Our commitment is, I am quoting, “our best effort”. There are a lot of emotions running in this process right now, and I can understand it: people want vaccine. I want the vaccine too, I want it today. But, at the end of the day, it's a complicated process. We are getting there, in two or three months we will be at scale. We have a 17-million-dose production per month right now, it is actually not small at all. But of course, it’s less than people want and understandably so”.

You're a great poster and someone who is more knowledgable than myself on a lot of things. But pinning the pull out on AZ without factoring in the mistakes and frankly ludicrous decisions from the EU Commission (please let me be clear, I am not blaming any particular nation or government here) is kind of baffling for someone such as yourself, and to me shows just as much bias as Pete does with everything being anti-EU or whatever.

I'll have to try and catch up with the latest and see what's happened with the AZ deal now, with the EU, and read up on it. I'm not defending them as such, it'd be a weird position to take, but to me it's baffling that the EU have left themselves open to this and then, as @Billy Dean said, sources within the German government, for no apparent reason, making a complete arse of themselves and having to force their government to deny some pretty ridiculous claims which seemed like a case of a spoilt kid not being able to get what they wanted. And, as we know from our government doing just that, that isn't right and should be called out.
 
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