I say the brand damage to AZ due to their own production issues, Oxford due to what seems to be dodgy research trials (still not approved by FDA) and UK where politicians wrapped the vaccine in union jack and hitched it to Brexit bandwagon for jignoistic reasons, means this vaccine is now tainted in peoples eyes with negative associations. Which is a pitty but i see both sides of arguments.
TL.DR a month ago i predicted it be pretty much unusable in europe and thats more or less case. As for AZ if they have broken contracts then yes failure should be punished in courts, but IMNAL! for population at large what matters more is that better vaccines are available faster and this vaccine doesnt lead to further hesitancy.
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.
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.
Its same in other countries ranging from no restriction to restriction being to anything up to under 60s
not recommended is not same as "banned" stop reading UK tabloids.
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.
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...
And that European bureaucracy (consider spending taxpayers money) is screwing things (once in a while) up, is not a new thing.
I would call it naive and not arrogant.
The point of a contract is always that fulfilling the contract is mandatory.
That said, legal proceedings won't make anything go faster any more than other attempts at what sounds like 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?
It isn't. It's just that "euroskeptics" will distort arguments for the sole purpose of hating and dividing
This is true of almost zero contracts.
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. As it turns out, you need some charisma and vision to effectively do things.
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.
[1] https://www.politico.eu/article/coronavirus-vaccine-europe-c...
This seems to be a contractual dispute.
"The contract makes clear the Commission and EU countries can't sue the drugmaker for a host of issues, most notably if there are 'delays in delivery of the Vaccine under this Agreement.'"
The EU needs to focus on getting more vaccines. I would suggest to start trail/approval processes for the vaccines from Russia and China. In particular China has shown the capacity and a willingness to export.
So let's eat our pride and focus on getting the pandemic under control.
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.
To me EU has been naive and unable to protect the interests and lives of Europeans when other countries went for war-like export controls and aggressive poaching of vaccine companies / resources.
I have posted this before:
https://twitter.com/DaveKeating/status/1372897635577761803
https://www.axios.com/countries-producing-most-coronavirus-v...
I am German, we developed the Pfizer vaccine, but there is _no_ news about it, it seems like the AZ vaccine is the only option.
Is it a case that Pfizer wasn't viable, wasn't used here, or only made lucrative contracts with other countries, or is it being used, quietly without drama because they are fulfilling their obligations, unlike AZ who seems to be in the news every day.
I celebrated the success of the scientists (Turkish immigrants) who developed it, after the waves and waves of racism in Germany, having immigrants develop a vaccine helped vindicate some of our nation's political decisions to open the doors and borders, that we do in fact benefit, and, sadly now they seem to be invisible again.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-bionte...
Thanks for this link. I would much rather that the media kept me up to date on this instead!
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.
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.
To say that the EU as a whole wouldn’t block exporting is a bit premature when we already have precedent.
"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.
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2021/04/06/scientists-against...
Multiple countries should've been preparing manufacturing facilities well in advance, and those that couldn't should've been scrambling to order from every vendor just in case. A "war effort" if you will. Instead we got a very inward and reactionary response (lockdowns etc) but lacked that longer term visionary response which required foresight of only six months.
The following is my speculation, but - it's probably a consequence of having mostly lawyers in charge, and having elected representatives rather far removed from a direct democratic vote as in the case of the EU (although non-EU countries mostly responded in the same way by ignoring therapeutics and vaccines too)
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.
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?
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.
> 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...
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.
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.
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.
The negotiation wasn't about the purchasing prise of a shot, but about the price to "reserve a shot". Germany spent ca. 4€ per capita on "reserving an AZ shot", which adds up to a total spending of ca. 350M€.
Just to have a comparison:
- Last time I bought a beer in a pub in Munich a paid more than 4€
- Just last week Germany spent 1.7B€ on a Syrian topic, which obviously won't change anything, neither for Syria, nor for Germany
- The lockdown - ongoing since November - costs 3 to 4B€ per week
The only one acting not like a moron in this situation is AZ: selling the vaccine to whoever pays the highest price. If the German politicians could pay the highest price, but doesn't want to, whose fault is that?
Funny fact: a friend of mine gets paid to support German R&D on measuring COVID concentration in the sewers to develop an early-warning-system. He says this money should be used to buy vaccines instead of founding some random R&D.
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.
This is in stark contrast to 0.25 million doses AstraZeneca vaccines that were blocked, which is what you are referring to. That has been the only blocked export as of now, at least according to my information.
We may thus indeed have precedent, but it's a very specific precedent which doesn't really serve as an example for a broad vaccine export ban. That's because the legislation on which this precedent was based does only allow such action in the first place if the manufacturer is lacking behind in serving the existing contracts with the EU (a situation in which AstraZeneca is in, but not BioNTech/Pfizer, the top exporter by number of doses in Europe) or if the target of the shipment is a country that is significantly ahead in its domestic vaccination campaign when compared with the EU. This means that there isn't even suitable legislation to instantiate a broad export ban in the EU right now, but just for smaller, more targeted bans; of course this would ultimately not pose an insurmountable hurdle as EU legislation can be changed by the EU itself, but it sends a pretty clear signal that a blanket ban on exports is nothing that's even considered right now.
The above post is about a contractual dispute, for which a lawsuit is the obvious path. I still don't understand what you'd expect.
Don't know about the US situation.
It would be one thing to, let's say, get vaccinated with a non-approved vaccine and claim damage, otherwise, unless, let's say AZ is excluded and maybe simply not "preferred" then it should be ok - as per 1. 1. which ok uses "empfohlen" (recommended/endorsed) so maybe it could be argued but I think it's more in favour of being in the scope rather than not
In many EU countries, the vaccine was banned for large segments of the population for extended periods of time.
Also happened in Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Norway, Iceland, and some African countries.
I have no love for Putin or Johnson but this most certainly wasn’t down to just their politics. EU leaders are massively at fault here with their rhetoric too.
Things have changed a lot since then, it's been forgotten.
And it's nothing to be ashamed about. E.g. see https://m.republicworld.com/world-news/rest-of-the-world-new...
I think we are quite active on protecting our interests. Just enforcing a Germany first politic is a complete break from our public agenda.
But also: we see permanently how it does not work.
And also: I think we have a quite elaborate way of protecting our interests. Just the tools are so complex and the plans so multi leveled that we often fail.
I can relate to that, which is also a reason why I now _try_ to consume weekly newspapers (like the linked "Die Zeit") instead of the daily/hourly short-lived news. In my experience the latter tend to report more about "drama" and focus more on negative things, exactly like you said.
I also saw your remark in the other chain:
> I was referring more to the discourse, which seems to be about heightening nationalistic sentiments by pitting governments against each other fighting over a small stockpile
And that also makes sense. I'd say that's something especially prominent nowadays due to Brexit. The amount of news highlighting the failures of the EU certainly got an uptick in the UK and so did the news portraying UK's vaccine import as "egoistic" in the German media. There are certainly more shades to that, but it's pretty obvious from the newspapers as well that the EU and UK are just frustrated with each other currently.
I disagree. Lockdowns were not proposed by lawyers or politicians, but rather the scientific community. In fact, in countries were the scientific advice was ignored, you had the fewest restrictions.
Also, "At the beginning of the pandemic, there should've been overwhelming support for therapeutics and vaccines." shows what the problem really is.
This is the politicians POV, in my opinion. A kind of mythical man-month for science. Long-term investment must be made in fundamental science so we can have nice things like mRNA vaccines. The politicians mentality of "pour millions in research" and they'll come up with something in two weeks is a real problem. Pure and fundamental research must be supported continuously, which is something politicians typically don't.
The hard, longer-term work of building out local vaccine manufacturing and distribution wasn't done because it required way more foresight, executive planning ability and basic scientific/medical knowledge.
The other contributing factor is that politicians don't want to be embarrassed if they create some expensive manufacturing facility which ends up being unused. Better to just not make it at all and you'll be safe - after all, that's what everyone else did.
Lack of spending on science research is one thing, but couldn't they have at least imported a little talent to create redundant vaccine manufacturing facilities to deal with just this one acute crisis? It seems like the only person thinking about that was Bill Gates? Why can't our elected leaders show the same leadership? The only country that I'd expect to have this kind of technocratic vision and execution would be China.
I think the main problem with politicians was that they hesitated because they wanted to have two contradictory things: lockdowns to slow down the pandemic (until vaccines were ready) and keeping the economy going "as normal". IMO you can't square that circle.
They _did_. The only reason that production has gone as well as it has (particularly with Pfizer and Biontec) is massive public and private investment in facilities.
For example, in software, maybe it takes a single developer a year to build a compiler for some advanced language and we can speed it up to 3 months by adding some people. But could we get to a week by adding 12x more? We can‘t and it may be the same with vaccine production.
I was referring more to the discourse, which seems to be about heightening nationalistic sentiments by pitting governments against each other fighting over a small stockpile, rather than highlighting the progress/pitfalls/ongoing support needs of collaborative initiatives to provide scaled solutions.
But maybe this is just a sign that I need to broaden my media inputs, always a good thing to do.
Your comment makes absolutely no sense.
It does not appear the AZ are shipping vaccine to customers based on price. We know that Pfizer are, which is why Israel has been able to pay them a premium to get vaccines first.
Rather, AZ appear to have set up manufacturing dedicated to particular contracts - for instance separate manufacturing in the EU, manufacturing in the UK, manufacturing in the US, and manufacturing in Latin America. They seem to have written contracts that say 'you get what your dedicated manufacturing produces'.
The dispute between the EU and AZ is about whether the UK counts as being in the EU - in my opinion AZ appear to have taken money from the UK to build factories there, included those factories in the EU's contracted dedicated manufacturing when they should not have, and then refused to give the EU the vaccines from these factories.
This became relevant because AZ manufacturing yields are lower than expected - less vaccine than expected is being produced for a given amount of manufacturing capacity - so the bugs in their contractual arrangements have become visible.
So, I agree that AZ screwed up, but I disagree with your model of why.
It came a couple of weeks ago in the news that 29M AZ shots, hidden in an Italian harbour, waiting to be shipped out of Europe, were found by the authorities. As I said -> selling the vaccine to whoever pays the highest price.
To correct what you wrote, they were found in a warehouse at a bottling plant, not a harbor, and half of them were COVAX shots that had been produced by the South American supply chain and had just come through Europe for bottling and QC.
The other half were EU shots - held back because the EU had not yet given regulatory approval to the bottling plant.
The allegation, made by un-named sources, is that AZ were deliberately delayed this regulatory approval, presumably by being slow to file paperwork. As there is obvious hostility towards AZ, it is also possible factors on the EU side were causing a delay.
I would say that, having raided a factory with great fanfair looking undeclared stockpiles, saying you found one, and then discovering it was declared and all above board, one way out of the PR problem would be to anonymously make an allegation like that. On the other hand, maybe it's true. Who knows.
With that said... once you start thinking AZ are secretly holding vaccines back to smuggle out of Europe like some Columbian cartel, you are well into QAnon teritory. They would be risking a lot to do that - they are already facing so much for failing to meet a contract, actually smuggling drugs would destory the company. Why would they do it?
The Laender (states) may also recommend a vaccine, deviating from the federal STIKO recommendation. But they didn't really do that either, the wording is always very unclear and weasely around AZ. In several press statements, the phrase "auf eigene Gefahr" (at your own peril) has also occured. So I would wait for a clarification.
Edit: medical professionals seem similarly confused about the matter, KVNO is very roughly speaking a doctors guild: https://coronavirus.nrw/haftungsausschluss-bei-impfung-mit-a...
Yes I know. You seem to be insinuating that it's all the EUs fault, and so I wanted to provide a bit of perspective.
> I don't believe anyone involved
I like the version "I don't believe anyone if money and/or politics is involved".