[dtf]

> European politicians have been attacking the AZ vaccine because it originates from the UK and they are ideologically blinded by hatred of Brexit.

There was a good piece in the Irish Times this weekend if you fancy a less UK-centric view on this. The view you've expressed above seems to be the only one I read among the British press/commentariat. Perhaps it is the UK that is blinded?

https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/brexit-blinds-britain-to-...

"The Oxford/AstraZeneca team managed an extraordinary feat – producing a safe and effective vaccine against a novel coronavirus within a few months. Yet time and again, AstraZeneca has undermined its own efforts with communication blunders, a lack of transparency and a consistent record of overestimating its own capacity to deliver."

[thu2111]

Well, we know what the EU press are claiming, but that quoted paragraph isn't true is it? How has AZ undermined its own efforts? Where are the communication problems or lack of transparency? They have been doing pretty clear press releases where they address whatever the latest nonsense de jour is. For example, their response to the claims the vaccine was dangerous was very clear and unambiguous. The confusion here has been generated exclusively by one side.

As for the contract, the Commission released that contract specifically redacted to try and imply it said things it didn't, but they redacted it wrongly. Note that the EU committed itself to secrecy about their agreements as part of negotiating a lower price than other countries are paying. Then a Belgian minister violated that agreement too by publishing the prices. So it's hard to criticise AZ for lack of transparency when no company publishes customer contracts proactively and the EU itself has tried to hide the details of its own agreement as part of misleading the public. We know that the Commission was lying about things partly because they keep accidentally releasing information they intended to be kept secret.

The fact is, the EU has been taking measures and making statements here that are UK specific. When it declared it would require vaccine export licenses it exempted every neighbouring state, except the UK. When it suspended the Northern Ireland protocol over vaccines, it was a UK specific move. Now they are threatening to seize factories and block exports of already paid for vaccines, to the UK. If there's some explanation for this that isn't political it's not obvious what it is, because AZ has done nothing wrong, and nor has the UK.

[luckylion]

> The view you've expressed above seems to be the only one I read among the British press/commentariat.

I'm from Germany, and that has been pretty much my impression as well. Merkel gave vaccine orders as a PR gift to von der Leyen/EU, they messed up badly. While that came out piece by piece, surprise surprise, in came the "mistakes".

I'm sure it's not a large conspiracy, at some point there's enough FUD spread everywhere that everyone's threshold for "pause the campaign" is low enough, "just to be safe", but some parts of it very much did look like revenge.