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As predicted, the rock apes of Brexit have elevated the risk of conflict between the UK and the EU. It's just painful dealing with the handy work of dimwits fantasising in such an interconnected world that new divisions could do anything but threaten the peace between old enemies.
Now, the EU and the UK are pitted against each other under tense circumstances.
First this:
AstraZeneca appears to be in danger of breaching its contract to supply the EU, and may have to renegotiate its contract to supply vaccines to the EU, the UK or both, legal experts have warned.
To the anger of European leaders, the Anglo-Swedish company has said it will only be able to deliver 25% of the 100m doses pledged to the bloc by the end of March due to a production problem in Belgium.
Millions of doses of coronavirus vaccine could be blocked from entering Britain from the EU within days after Brussels said it had to respond to shortages emerging in member states.
Following reports of a lack of doses across the bloc, the European commission announced plans to give national regulators the power to reject export requests. The development raises concerns over the continued flow of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, for which the UK has a 40m-dose order, from its plant in Belgium.
Seems simple to me, the UK signed up before the EU so they get first bite and the EU is shitty.
Meanwhile now apparently the people most at risk are the ones who shouldn't be vaccinated.
Germany's vaccine commission said the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine should not be given to people older than 65 years, amid a bitter dispute between the European Union and the drugmaker over delayed supplies.
The Standing Committee on Vaccination (STIKO) at Germany's Robert Koch Institute (RKI), the country's main public health authority, found there is insufficient data on the effectiveness of the vaccine, developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford, for this age group, according to a statement from the interior ministry on Thursday.
"Due to the small number of study participants in the age group ≥65 years, no conclusion can be made regarding efficacy and safety in the elderly. This vaccine is therefore currently recommended by STIKO only for persons aged 18-64 years," the panel said in its recommendation.
Seems simple to me, the UK signed up before the EU so they get first bite and the EU is shitty.
Contracts obviously don't work like school lunch lines unless they stipulate that they work that way, though. That article you quoted is almost entirely AstraZeneca's claim about the contract mixed with the school lunch line PR tactic.
Whatever the case may be, the general problem remains. When decisions are that consequential, a closer alliance between states means this sort of risk is at least contained and resolution easier to come by. You can see this type of dispute blowing up awfully quickly under the pressure of piles of dead bodies.
Seems simple to me, the UK signed up before the EU so they get first bite and the EU is shitty.
Contracts obviously don't work like school lunch lines unless they stipulate that they work that way, though. That article you quoted is almost entirely AstraZeneca's claim about the contract mixed with the school lunch line PR tactic.
Whatever the case may be, the general problem remains. When decisions are that consequential, a closer alliance between states means this sort of risk is at least contained and resolution easier to come by. You can see this type of dispute blowing up awfully quickly under the pressure of piles of dead bodies.
A further piece emphasising contract is king with reference to a likely similar contract:
AstraZeneca appears to be in danger of breaching its contract to supply the EU, and may have to renegotiate its contract to supply vaccines to the EU, the UK or both, legal experts have warned.
To the anger of European leaders, the Anglo-Swedish company has said it will only be able to deliver 25% of the 100m doses pledged to the bloc by the end of March due to a production problem in Belgium.
AstraZeneca has claimed that its vaccine contract with the EU obliges it only to make “best efforts” to supply the bloc. Although the terms of the deal are unknown, AstraZeneca has indicated it may publish the contract on Friday.
But an agreement between the EU and CureVac, another vaccine supplier, published last week, suggests AstraZeneca may be legally obliged to deliver more vaccines to the EU if it can be established that the company is diverting supplies to the UK.
David Greene, the president of the Law Society and a senior partner at Edwin Coe, where he litigates contracts, said: “If they [AZ] gave assurances that they made reasonable best efforts to supply the EU but were in fact diverting material from one place to another, that would on the face of it be a potential breach of obligations to use reasonable best efforts.”
The published contract with CureVac, which was highlighted by the legal writer David Allen Green , says “reasonable best efforts” include a commitment to “establish sufficient manufacturing capacities to enable the manufacturing and supply of contractually agreed volumes of the product … in accordance with the estimated delivery schedule”.
As Green noted in a blogpost: “The existence of that ‘best efforts’ provision may not be that helpful to AstraZeneca, if the correct construction of the contract is that it does not cover diverted capacity as opposed to lack of capacity.”
That plus a number of suburban Police stations being forced to close due to lack of resources.
Saying it was a Police decision is as weak a cop out as claiming that curfews were a Police decision and all the lockdowns were on Chief health Office advice. Dan makes decisions and others have to pick up the pieces but this was signalled a week ago when Police due to go up to border patrol duty this weekend had their shifts cancelled.
It was all a political stunt, payback for NSW closing it's border when the virus was out of control here. The twice elected premier of Melbourne is consistent in caring more about his reputation than his constituents.
And @Ptiddy, if the best news resource you can find is the guardian, just don't bother.
Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down.
It’s unfortunate that the rest of the country including Victoria had to clean up the unwelcome export from NSW that is the Sydney Virus. Still somebody had to do the heavy lifting after the Berejiklian Balls up.
Given the ADF were politically motivated not to provide personnel then Victoria had to stand up and deploy the Police to prevent further spread because of Gladys’s negligence.
Now that NSW is beginning to emulate Victoria with the lack of Community Spread then it is logical to redeploy the policing resources. The police need to be congratulated for a job well done.
Well done too to the twice elected Premier of Victoria for stopping the spread and well done to every other state for dealing effectively with Gladys’s negligence.
Today is the 23rd consecutive day of no Community Spread in Victoria: a job well done.
“I even went as far as becoming a Southern Baptist until I realised they didn’t keep ‘em under long enough” Kinky Friedman
Seems simple to me, the UK signed up before the EU so they get first bite and the EU is shitty.
Contracts obviously don't work like school lunch lines unless they stipulate that they work that way, though. That article you quoted is almost entirely AstraZeneca's claim about the contract mixed with the school lunch line PR tactic.
Whatever the case may be, the general problem remains. When decisions are that consequential, a closer alliance between states means this sort of risk is at least contained and resolution easier to come by. You can see this type of dispute blowing up awfully quickly under the pressure of piles of dead bodies.
A further piece emphasising contract is king with reference to a likely similar contract:
AstraZeneca appears to be in danger of breaching its contract to supply the EU, and may have to renegotiate its contract to supply vaccines to the EU, the UK or both, legal experts have warned.
To the anger of European leaders, the Anglo-Swedish company has said it will only be able to deliver 25% of the 100m doses pledged to the bloc by the end of March due to a production problem in Belgium.
AstraZeneca has claimed that its vaccine contract with the EU obliges it only to make “best efforts” to supply the bloc. Although the terms of the deal are unknown, AstraZeneca has indicated it may publish the contract on Friday.
But an agreement between the EU and CureVac, another vaccine supplier, published last week, suggests AstraZeneca may be legally obliged to deliver more vaccines to the EU if it can be established that the company is diverting supplies to the UK.
David Greene, the president of the Law Society and a senior partner at Edwin Coe, where he litigates contracts, said: “If they [AZ] gave assurances that they made reasonable best efforts to supply the EU but were in fact diverting material from one place to another, that would on the face of it be a potential breach of obligations to use reasonable best efforts.”
The published contract with CureVac, which was highlighted by the legal writer David Allen Green , says “reasonable best efforts” include a commitment to “establish sufficient manufacturing capacities to enable the manufacturing and supply of contractually agreed volumes of the product … in accordance with the estimated delivery schedule”.
As Green noted in a blogpost: “The existence of that ‘best efforts’ provision may not be that helpful to AstraZeneca, if the correct construction of the contract is that it does not cover diverted capacity as opposed to lack of capacity.”
Very clear that after the initial spike, infection rates dramatically reduced over the northern hemisphere summer, even though they were still as high or higher than Victoria at it's peak. The death rate also plateaued after a huge early spike and is only now starting to creep back up but unlike the first wave the death rate isn't going up at the same rate as infections.
France is very similar, the key difference is the initial large number of deaths with a comparatively small infection rate but despite the massive number of daily infections at present it's not being reflected in the death rate.
Italy almost a mirror of France.
It means we're very well placed heading into our summer.
Just a note on data-comparisons between March/April events and current events in Europe.
The early case numbers data for the large foreign outbreaks need to be viewed with extreme scepticism. There is little doubt that, as you say, "after the initial spike, infection rates dramatically reduced over the northern hemisphere summer". I do not think, though, that the data - such as they are and properly understood - can be used to support a conclusion that "unlike the first wave the death rate isn't going up at the same rate as infections."
Rather, that apparent comparison emerges because: (a) case numbers ramp up well before deaths do (people don't seem to die in a hurry from the virus) - typically, deaths seem to lag infections by about 4 to 6 weeks (so, if you compare the rolling-average death rate for the last 7 days with the 7-day rolling average of new cases 4 to 6 weeks ago in the UK, you get a much more unsettling proportion of deaths than from looking at a comparison of each day's "spot" data); and (b) because of low testing numbers early on, the actual numbers of cases were probably 10 to 20 times as high as were being reported. Consequently, it is likely that cases in, eg, the UK are ramping up but are still, in fact, only around 20% to 25% of the numbers that were actually being infected back in mid-April, even though the raw data suggests that there are 5 times as many new cases per day now as there were back then.
Put simply, the early case number data in Europe drastically under-enumerated the number of cases because testing was trivial - and largely confined, it would appear, to people with serious symptoms.
In the last hour or so, Macron has just announced a new lockdown in France, citing estimates that, as things stand, the alternative is an additional 400,000 deaths in France in the immediate future. He's not getting those figures from the present average of well under 250 new deaths per day. He's getting those projections from modelling that indicates where the deaths are going to go over the next couple of months, absent serious intervention.
Just a small update on this late-October 2020 discussion of some European data in the Part 2 thread. The position is now that the average daily death rate in the UK is higher than that reported at the highest peak in the initial outbreak of the disease there in 2020. It is also 6 times as high (1,200 per day, compared to 200 per day) as it was in late October 2020. In the intervening three months, the total number of deaths reported in the UK from COVID-19 has more than doubled. That said, the average number of daily new cases is now under half its peak (which was about 60,000 per day) less than 3 weeks ago. Because of the lag effect that I mentioned when I was looking at the data in late October, the daily death rate in the UK is at its highest level, ever. By contrast, France - which went into a lockdown announced at that time - has had a total of around 70,000 reported deaths, well short of the likely 400,000 Macron had expressed concern about, absent strenuous measures.
stui magpie wrote:And @Ptiddy, if the best news resource you can find is the guardian, just don't bother.
I quoted it for convenience, obviously.
If I bother to find a superior source which quotes the very same legal opinions that the The Guardian quoted, and another superior source which quotes the very same AstraZeneca PR that CNN quoted, will that help you?
You seem to be labouring under the misapprehension that pitting CNN against The Guardian wins you the World Series of Research
This is the worrying risk that serious coordination between countries avoids, but the wreckers of Brexit cluelessly invited (as if their by now years of economic and managerial carnage weren't enough):
The EU is likely to unveil special powers later to help ensure its supply of vaccines, including a possible limit on the export of vaccines produced in the bloc.
There is speculation that these powers could also see companies being forced to hand over production to other firms inside the EU and share intellectual property.
However, the European Council is stressing the need for negotiations in order to reach a solution before enforcement becomes necessary.
Meanwhile, EU Justice Commissioner Didier Reynders has warned of a "vaccine war".
Speaking on Belgian radio, he said: "The EU Commission has pushed to co-ordinate the vaccines contracts on behalf of the 27 precisely to avoid a vaccines war between EU countries, but maybe the UK wants to start a vaccine war?
"Solidarity is an important principle of the EU. With Brexit, it's clear that the UK doesn't want to show solidarity with anyone."
