Quote:
Originally Posted by 1andrew1
Two months plus ago is a long time in Covid vaccination production.  My understanding is that Merck is now a parallel supplier to Croda and ramping up production all the time. However, putting this aside, Pfizer is a US company and its EU plant produces vaccine for all countries outside the US. Yes, even Canada has to get its Pfizer vaccines delivered from Belgium! For this reason, I am sure that Pfizer could tap its US supplier to temporarily fill a gap in UK supply. But I am happy to go on record and predict that Pfizer exports to the UK will not be banned.
Hugh cited the journalist Dave Keating's Tweet yesterday reiterating the EU deal was signed a day before the UK one. We all agree that the UK deal was more tightly worded meaning that no Covid 19 vaccines have been exported from the UK whilst needed in this country. By contrast, the EU has exported some 41 million vaccine doses with a quarter of these going to the UK. |
Err no, that’s not *quite* what Keating said. The crucial tweet is this one:
Quote:
AstraZeneca signed purchasing agreement with EU one day before its agreement with UK.
AZ CEO told an EP hearing last month that UK priority comes from research funding agreement Oxford signed with UK gov in Jan/Feb 2020, inherited by AZ when it partnered with Oxford in May 2020.
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Keating is making a very narrow technical point when he says the EU signed a purchasing agreement the day before the UK did. The fact is there was no immediate hurry for the UK to conclude precise purchase terms because priority of supply was already established, thanks to the UK government’s foresight in:
1. Funding vaccine research well before covid became a problem in the UK
2. Insisting that the eventual product must be manufactured in the UK so that supply to the UK could be assured
3. Ensuring terms relating to priority of supply were written in from the outset, and
4. Ensuring those terms were rolled on to AsraZeneca when it received the contract to manufacture.
UK priority does not arise from a later, but better, agreement than the one the EU signed. It arises from funding, negotiations and a priority of supply agreement between the UK and Oxford, and latterly AZ, that was all in place much, much earlier.
In this context the UK’s later conclusion of purchase terms is irrelevant - all the important supply terms were already in place.