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Originally Posted by Sephiroth
Where's your evidence for that, Ben?
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I’m likewise curious to see the evidence that HMG has based its vaccine procurement policy on the likely cost.
As far as I can see, the principal components of the portfolio the government pre-ordered are an mRNA vaccine by Pfizer-BioNTech and a viral vector vaccine by Oxford-AstraZeneca. The former is the riskier because it is novel technology so is more expensive (most expensive of the lot in fact). The alternative mRNA vaccine is produced by Moderna and is somewhat cheaper, however it is a bigger risk because Moderna has never produced a vaccine before now.
The UK government procurement strategy appears to have been based on calculating risk and investing in a way that hedges against that risk. Despite the portfolio being biased towards the much cheaper Oxford vaccine, if the overall strategy had been driven by cost you would have expected them to lay their riskier bet with the cheaper Moderna mRNA vaccine as the EU did, rather than Pfizer.
It’s worth noting, on the subject of the Moderna vaccine, that when they announced their excellent trial results a few days after Pfizer, there was much shrill squealing from the usual suspects at how the EU had preordered that one and we hadn’t. To date, the Moderna vaccine has only been approved in the USA (at the end of last week). It won’t be approved in the EU before 6 January. The Pfizer vaccine was approved in the EU yesterday - almost 3 weeks behind the UK. Something that should be repeated loudly and often.