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Originally Posted by jfman
I'd expect the CEO of a company to defend their position robustly. I'd be reluctant to necessarily take that at face value especially when a customer says the opposite.
Equally, the customer have a public relations interest in robustly defending their position.
I don't really see the complexity here - the contracts either say one thing or they don't. But let's distract people in the meantime waving some flags.
---------- Post added at 11:56 ---------- Previous post was at 11:52 ----------
As the EU say, they're not in a queue down the butchers. AZ have contracts that if they clearly present prioritisation and acknowledge risks to supply are sound.
Agreeing to supply at cost is particularly problematic if there are penalties linked to being unable to supply elsewhere. Very quickly your financial considerations swing to that customer if your contracts haven't covered yourself.
If you take flags and the fact it's one of the most important products of our lifetimes there's cold hard underlying capitalism and economics.
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You’re still so determined to see this as a distasteful exercise in flag-waving I can’t help wondering if you’ve actually read the La Repubblica article yet. Reading and commenting on the substance of that would be more fruitful than continuing to try to make other people’s comments fit what you assume their agenda to be.
Pascal Soirot is French, and the company he leads is UK-Swedish. He makes the points most forcefully that this isn’t, in his view, a nationalistic issue, but simply a matter of contract. He gives a detailed explanation of his company’s position on that, which the EU has since refuted, but as there’s a confidentiality clause we may never be able to judge for ourselves.
It has only become a UK v EU issue in the last 24 hours because the EU’s health commissioner has insisted UK produced vaccines must be sent to the EU, in the full knowledge that the UK government would at some point be forced into defending its own contract with AstraZeneca. BoJo resisted answering direct questions on that last night, but they have come up with their Line To Take overnight and Michael Gove was tasked with getting that message out this morning. Even here it’s really not reasonable to perceive jingoistic flag waving - HMG is responding to comments the EU was fully aware would be incendiary.
This really ought to be an end to the issue because Soirot has been abundantly clear that he will not authorise export of UK product to the EU and the EU can’t compel him to do so. HMG has made its position clear; its ready to do what it can to help but this stops short of releasing product that has already been allocated to the UK’s vaccination schedule. So will the EU take the only reasonable option, and work directly with AstraZeneca to expedite improvements at its EU-based facilities, or will it now take steps to prevent Pfizer product leaving the EU for the UK?