isaac_newton wrote:Bluesqueak wrote:
Not much chance, no. The UK has paid for 100 million AZ vaccines upfront in a binding agreement that predates the EU one by several months. While AstraZeneca can use the UK plants to supply other countries, the UK contract specifically states that this is only after that first 100 million. Plus, as you say, it’s kind of a national emergency situation. How can we justify diverting vaccines (that we have legally bought and paid for) from vulnerable people in the UK when we’d be sending them to countries with nowhere near our rate of deaths?
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technical question... I'm pretty that the AZ-EU contract has been published. not so sure about the AZ-UK contractequ?
The full AZ-UK contract has not been published, though certain parts of it are now public knowledge. It's known, for example, that it required AZ to set up UK production facilities rather than import from the US or EU and that its delivery number/dates deadlines didn't have a 'best efforts' clause - X number by X date or penalties would ensue.
There has been some speculation whether the UK contract is with AZ UK and the EU contract is with AZ AB (AZ is an Anglo-Swedish company, so has a UK legal entity and a Swedish legal entity).
I'm not a lawyer, but the lawyer types seem to think that it's possible AZ AB could sign a 'no conflicting obligations' contract simply because the AB legal entity (EU) didn't have any- it was their UK partner who had the legal obligations under UK law. That would suggest that AZ saw the two contracts as being as different legally as AZ's contract to set up vaccine manufacture and supply in India, Mexico et al.
The EU, otoh, seems to have seen the UK plants as available to supply them (there's a line in the EU contract that 'EU includes UK').