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Originally Posted by Chris
The Grauniad reports that what the EU has had since summer is a “potential purchase agreement” for Moderna’s vaccine.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...-covid-vaccine
That’s somewhat less concrete than the firm pre-order HMG has placed with Pfizer. The government has cited higher cost, potential supply chain issues in Europe, and Moderna’s refusal to sign any actual supply contracts outside the USA as reasons for concentrating on Pfizer. It also quite reasonably points out that it therefore has an RNA vaccine in its portfolio. Pfizer’s cooperation with BioNTech on this project also means there will initially be two European manufacturing bases for it so there’s no chance of the US government slapping an export ban on the product to give their own population priority. |
Seeing as the US has a deal already in place for upto 500m doses and has handed over $1billion to build a plant and another $1.5billion for the initial 100m doses, they obviously have early access rights, just as the UK has early access rights on other vaccines. Moderna is looking to build up manufacturing in Europe.