Unlike me to not be knocking the UK Gov but .... credit where credit due.
The Oxford University and AstraZeneca partnership came out of the UK Govs dedicated Vaccines Taskforce, basically the Gov fitted them together.
Oxford University’s vaccine research was given £20 million Government funding.
AstraZeneca will work with global partners on the international distribution of the vaccine, particularly working to make it available and accessible for low and medium-income countries.
Both partners have agreed to operate on a not-for-profit basis for the duration of the coronavirus pandemic.
Only the costs of production and distribution are being covered.
Uk got early access because Gov basically took a punt on it being successful as they ordered millions of doses before the trial results were out.
EU ordered 3 months later so unfortunately behind us in the queue.
The agreements between Astra and UK & EU have not been released but apparently, Astra saying that it was a best endeavours agreement. So not sure how far EU will get with that one. If it goes to court the agreements would have to be released.
EU supply will happen when previous commitments have been fulfilled.
Think there's a lot of smoke being blown around.
EU because they were late ordering, but then would you order a car if there was no guarantee the engine would work.
UK Gov took a speculative punt and this time it paid off. If the trials had failed then would have been a different story, I guess they were sweating for a while there. But it didn't and so we were front of the queue.
In the big scheme of things, there seems to be some disparity with costs of the vaccine being sold to smaller countries for double the price, but I guess whether that is true or not will come out in the wash.
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