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An incredibly interesting article on AstraZeneca

AstraZeneca vaccine - was it really worth it?https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-56570364

Ivonne Holliday ● 1854d3 Comments

Hello IvonneIt was infesting that an ex colleague of mine who now works at St George's (in IT not medicine, I hope!) posted something on Facebook today in support of AZ and what a good job they were doing. I'm guessing a lot of medical staff aren't happy with the bad PR AZ are getting?This document seeks to explain (in the embedded PDF) the intricacies of the Oxford Vaccine patents, etc. I've not read it properly yet:https://medicineslawandpolicy.org/2020/10/how-the-oxford-covid-19-vaccine-became-the-astrazeneca-covid-19-vaccine/

Michael Ixer ● 1854d

Hello Michael,I think politics is an enormous problem in the UK these days.  What rang alarm bells to me was that AstraZeneca had never produced vaccines before.....  A pattern that seems to be au rigour these days!But AstraZeneca has done incredibly well, or so I hope as I had its vaccine!As for licencing the vaccine to Serum Institute of India did not surprise me as they do produce an enormous amount of vaccines that are distributed worldwide.  Meningitis being one of them.It will be interesting to see what happens to its non-for-profit approach in the very near future.I will try to keep an eye on the news from AstraZeneca!!

Ivonne Holliday ● 1854d

Thanks, Ivonne. I started reading this earlier the got distracted so this jogged my memory. I guess the problem is politics - which happens in business anyway - but when elected politicians are involved they want someone to blame! AstraZeneca's inexperience with vaccine development and manufacturing cawnt have helped - it does seem some data has been a little messy and perhaps they did over promise on delivery? Not a major problem in normal times but when politicians are out of their comfort zone things are different.It might not be bad long-term: if things settle down and the vaccine helps then they may get kudos for their approach - and they'll certainly have learnt a lot about the vaccine market!Interesting - I thought from something else I'd read that Vaccitech Ltd owned the patents and were licensing it to AZ, Serum Institute of India ... but I may have misunderstood that; AZ may have patents that turn the research into a production vaccine?

Michael Ixer ● 1854d