i've given it a quick read, but i can't seem to find the part where the EU 'demands part of the UK's supply'. to me it reads like the EU is merely insisting that the company they made a deal with upholds their end of the bargain, using facilities the EU had previously put money into, to meet its demands.
your take looks a bit like a mischaracterisation honestly. you wouldn't happen to have hard feelings over something, my friend?

AstraZeneca aren't contractually obliged to meet the EU's demands, the supply is based on a 'best effort' clause

As the EU only negotiated their deal recently, the supply chain isn't up to scratch and there are delays as a result

No hard feelings, these are just facts. You're free to try and prove otherwise

The EU's vaccine purchase program was of course a failure of absolutely epic proportions, no doubt about that. Nonetheless, they have a contract with AstraZeneca and the EU is right to insist on AZ fulfilling it's contractual obligations. Specifically, it is unacceptable that AZ wants to reduce the vaccine delivery to the EU (compared to the goal stated in the contract) while continuing to fully meet it's shipment goals with the UK and other countries.

Look, everyone would understand it if AZ said "we have an issue with our production, we're trying our best to fix it asap, and in the meantime, we can ship less to our customers". But AZ going "we have a production problem, and therefore, we're gonna exclusively cut down the deliveries for the EU so we can uphold our contracts with everyone else" is unacceptable. The European economic area is the largest market in the world, and there will be hell to pay for AstraZeneca if they seriously think they can antagonize and fuck over the EU like that. If this is how they wanna play, fine, then it will take 10 years for new AZ products to get cleared by the EMA in the future and their factories in the EU will be "randomly" selected for surprise audits every other week.

again, can you point me to the part where the EU "demanded part of the UK's vaccine supply", or did you just lie about that?

oh, and insisting that facilities they previously invested money into are part of that 'best effort' certainly makes a sense to me.

I would also like to point out a contradiction in AZ's reasoning: on the one hand, they say that the UK, the US and other overseas buyers signed contracts before the EU, and that they therefore are entitled to preferential treatment. On the other hand, they argue that the EU negotiated badly and didnt put fixed delivery quantities into the contract, only a "best effort" clause, and that AZ therefore is legally in the right when they exclusively cut the shipment to the EU in the face of a production shortage.

But if they already knew that there would be high and fixed quantities going to the UK/US/rest of the world, why the heck did they put a number as high as 80m into the contract with the EU which they then cant keep up? The only explanation I can come up with is that they bit off more than they can chew, and are now trying to weasel out of their predicament by exploiting a wobbly clause in their contract with the EU. They might even be in the right from a strictly legal point of view, but it's an extremely shitty and bad faith treatment of a huge customer next to their door.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Jan 29 2021 04:43pm

https://www.ft.com/content/d814b2dc-a803-4680-b8c4-ffa2a4c370ad



I only deal in facts unlike you

In terms of who is right, I have no reason to doubt the company that is giving out a vaccine at cost. They have no real motive for screwing over the EU and know there is no contractual obligation to give in to the EU's demands

just what i expected, pure conjecture and bad faith misrepresentation of what was actually stated, and what makes a lot of sense from the EU's point of view. so no one actually "demanded part of the UK's vaccine supply" for the EU - you're just lying because you're mad.

It's like you are only willing to accept a literal quote of the EU saying 'we demand the UK vaccine supply', in contrast to political maneuvering to pressure AZ to divert vaccine supply away from the UK

You're just disagreeing with me for the sake of it because you don't have the guts to admit you were wrong

https://twitter.com/vonderleyen/status/1355299075223121928

and the climbdown is complete. so your position is now at odds with the EU that you were defending...