It was clearly idle speculation. It is without doubt that AZ’s credibility has been tarnished though.
What isn’t helpful is repeated false claims that need to be corrected.
Ah, your post has been liked by Flobs. The surest validation that what you’ve said is wrong.
Would it make you feel better knowing she works for a grammar school? 
I don’t think you need to look at nefarious financial motives. I think it’s very simply explained by self-interest of the politicians. One thing the last 15 months has really driven home is how bad the outcomes even for otherwise “good” politicians are willing to tolerate for the sake not taking short term bad press.
Out of interest I thought I’d google Sanofi Macron Shares and it seems France was as wary as the UK about securing supply of vaccines.
Sanofi received large backing to develop a vaccine candidate but there was a bit of an outcry last May…
Sanofi is to expand its vaccines manufacturing and build a new research center in its home market of France, as its CEO Paul Hudson looks to move on from a row over its COVID-19 vaccine candidate.
British-born Hudson got into hot water with political leaders in France last month when he said the US had earned the right to priority supplies of its coronavirus candidate if and when it was approved, thanks to its long-term investment in pandemic preparedness.
The US government’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Agency (BARDA) has played a key role in supporting biopharma companies working in infectious diseases in recent decades, and gave Sanofi $30m in February to help it develop its COVID-19 vaccine.
SANOFI CEO PAUL HUDSON
Hudson told Bloomberg in May that the US “has the right to the largest pre-order,” but soon had to backtrack after being summoned to the Élysée Palace by President Emmanuel Macron to explain his remarks. (Also see “Sanofi Calms France’s Fears Over COVID-19 Vaccine Access” - Scrip, 15 May, 2020.)
The similarities are eerie…
Macron summons Sanofi chief for claim US has ‘right to’ first Covid-19 jab
President echoes angry reactions in France by saying vaccine should ‘not be subject to market laws’
Sanofi chief Paul Hudson said the US government had ‘the right to the largest pre-order [of vaccines] because it’s invested in taking the risk’
Leila Abboud in Paris, Michael Peel in Brussels and Hannah Kuchler in New York MAY 14 2020
France has warned the pharmaceuticals group Sanofi it would be “unacceptable” for any country to have priority access to a Covid-19 vaccine, in a sign of mounting global concerns about the availability of a drug that stops the virus.
A row broke out on Wednesday when Paul Hudson, Sanofi chief executive, told Bloomberg News that the US “has the right to the largest pre-order because it’s invested in taking the risk”, referring to the Trump administration’s pledge to help finance the company’s experimental Covid-19 vaccine.
That sparked angry reactions in France: Emmanuel Macron, president, said any vaccine against Covid-19 must be treated as “public good for the world, and not subject to the laws of the market”. He has summoned Sanofi’s top management to the Elysée Palace next week.
In an interview for the FT’s Global Boardroom event, Mr Hudson said it was “news to him” that he had been called to meet the French president and denied that he meant the US would have access to the vaccine first.
“It was never a choice” between the US and Europe, he said, adding that if its Covid-19 vaccine were to succeed, Sanofi would draw on its global manufacturing capacity as the third-biggest vaccine maker in the world.
“I’ve been campaigning for European readiness to defeat Covid-19 for months,” Mr Hudson added. “We need to get vaccines to everybody across the world. We’re all going to have to play a huge part in that because if we add all the manufacturers in the world together, there still perhaps won’t be enough.”
The angry reaction to the world’s third-biggest vaccine maker underlines the tensions between countries and pharmaceutical companies. Even if a vaccine is found to be effective, ramping up production to meet demand will be a huge challenge, industry executives and experts such as Bill Gates have warned.
In an open letter released on Thursday, three African leaders and more than 140 public figures, including 50 former world leaders, called for any vaccine to be patent-free, produced at scale and made available at no cost to people everywhere.
Cyril Ramaphosa, South Africa’s president who also chairs the African Union, called for a “people’s vaccine” that would act as a global public good. He described a vaccine as humanity’s best hope of “putting a stop to this painful global pandemic”.
Mr Hudson, who took charge at Sanofi in September, has been lobbying the EU to adopt a US-like approach to financing vaccine development.
He has argued for Europe to develop an equivalent of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (Barda) — a US agency created in 2006 with the aim of preparing the US for bioterrorism threats as well as pandemics. It is committed to paying more than $1bn to companies — including Moderna, Johnson & Johnson and Sanofi — to fast-track Covid-19 vaccines.
The EU has not yet taken concrete action in that direction, but Mr Hudson said talks were continuing with the French government and the EU about sharing the risk of manufacturing.
There have also been questions about how a vaccine would be priced. J&J has said it will distribute its vaccine on a “non-profit basis” for the duration of the pandemic, but other big vaccine makers have not made their intentions clear.
Mr Hudson told the FT that Sanofi had “committed” that a vaccine would “be affordable for payers and patients alike.” He added he was “deeply sorry” to have sparked a controversy in France.
The stakes for getting early access to a vaccine could not be higher, with the pandemic hitting at a time when the US has withdrawn support for the World Health Organization.
Sanofi, which has two Covid-19 vaccines in development, including one in partnership with GlaxoSmithKline, has been vocal in calling for governments to do more to help the industry ramp up production.
Mr Hudson warned last month that the US was likely to be first in line to receive doses. This is because the US government had quickly provided funding to vaccine makers to help them carry out clinical trials and build production capacity even before efficacy was proved.
The US initiative is part of what Donald Trump has baptised “Operation Warp Speed”, designed to mobilise the pharma industry, the government and the military to accelerate availability of a vaccine.
There’s also this piece on the dangers of vaccine nationalism from May last year
If companies have been sharing how their covid vaccines are produced, would it not be better if politicians “encouraged” companies with the capability to produce these vaccines to do so for the current pandemic.There has to be more facilities available than the current few being utilised.
Wow. This article from 15 May last year is amazingly prophetic about where the EU now find themselves
Published: May 15, 2020 at 6:46 a.m. ET
By
Angry… French President Emmanuel Macron was reportedly “angry” when he heard that Sanofi, the French pharmaceutical he sees as a national champion, was considering making the U.S. market a priority for the manufacturing and distribution of its eventual coronavirus vaccine.
In the grand tradition of French industrial policy posturing, the French presidency soon let it be known that Macron had called Sanofi’s chairman, French business grandee Serge Weinberg, to tell him how “unacceptable” that would be.
And as if the presidential anger wasn’t enough, two members of Macron’s team — deputy finance minister Agnès Pannier-Runacher and Prime Minister Édouard Philippe — also immediately pitched in with their version of “unacceptable.”
That amounts to a whole new definition of “playing for the gallery.” Never mind that the coronavirus vaccine doesn’t even exist at this stage yet. Sanofi SAN, 0.26% is indeed working on it, and does this in partnership with GSK GSK, 0.34%, its U.K. competitor, in a collaboration that both companies have called “unprecedented.”
What triggered the French ire is a statement earlier this week by Sanofi Chief Executive Paul Hudson, who said that the U.S. would eventually “have the right to the largest preorder” of the vaccine “because it’s invested in taking the risk.” What he meant was strictly factual: as the GSK-Sanofi release announcing their partnership indicated a month ago, both companies’ virus research is being funded by the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), the U.S. government body responsible for the procurement and development of countermeasures against bioterrorism, chemical threats, pandemics and emerging diseases.
And it’s hard to accuse Hudson of springing a surprise on Europe or France. In the last two months, he has led a crusade to try convince Europeans to finance and set up manufacturing facilities for the future vaccine — which BARDA has done in the U.S. without waiting for the actual scientific breakthrough. When and if a vaccine is discovered, the main challenge will be to organize swiftly its mass production. What Hudson has been repeating for weeks is that Europe is badly lagging in preparing for this.
The French government noted that Sanofi has production facilities in France, which is true, but may not be commensurate with the size of the challenge that will arise once a vaccine is discovered. The naked truth is that Hudson’s campaign has revealed that Europeans have failed so far to put their money where their mouth has been.
Beyond the French government’s hypocrisy on the matter, the episode of Sanofi bashing also illustrates how industrial nationalism may play out in the post-coronavirus years, if governments try to force their national companies, champions or not, to prioritize their own domestic markets. As happened after the 2008 financial crisis, expect that particular form of populism to rise in the years ahead. And as demonstrated by the French government, populism remains a disease for which there is no vaccine in sight.
This is absolutely brilliant. It’s not mentioned in the video but there was a great stroke of fortune here. The factory had literally been upgraded to process higher volumes just as the pandemic struck.
Facilities at Halix (AstraZeneca) and Marburg (Pfizer) have just been approved by the EMA. Confirmation that Lonza (Moderna) has also been approved.
But the question must surely be…why did it take Pfizer and Moderna so long to obtain approval of these production facilities… 
I don’t think those are really the same issues. There have been serious questions asked about the potential to suspend intellectual property rights for all COVID related Biotech, but that is obviously a huge conversation and not in the domain of any one politician to address.
What I was talking about was that with very few exceptions, when politicians have been faced with the choice to do the immediately painful but right thing or the wrong thing that doesnt require them to take fire today, they have far too often taken the latter choice. That has resulted in lots of people looking for lots of scapegoats to cover their own arse and the public discourse has been a fucking disaster as a result.
My god, you’re telling me that better health care is available for those who can afford it???
The ones who don’t include you???
They were done months ago 
Then it must be you.You should tell them to take you off the request.
I understood,as we all realise,that politicians in the main look after number 1.I think the world has been let down by our leaders during this pandemic,there are very few who come out looking like they’ve done what was best for their countries.
As for property rights of vaccines,during a pandemic some of the norms should and do go out the window.As many facilities as possible should be used to manufacture product,irrespective of who developed the different vaccines.Pharma will always be profitable and will find a way to make back what they might think they have lost.
Yes, I agree with that.
What does need to happen though is for pharma to be incentivised to develop effective vaccines quickly, run them through rigorous trials, working alongside medical regulators so that approval can be quicker.
However, at the point that we get to say 3 or 4 effective vaccines the large facilities of the pharma companies whose vaccine candidate was not in those first 3 or 4 ought to be mandated to scale up supply (on a licensed basis) with % of profit margins depending on the % of their production, with the original pharma companies getting a % of profit as well as royalties.
Then the R&D teams can start anticipating mutations and preparing vaccine candidates in advance to tackle probable variations that then might arise (as is also happening right now). Important that genomic sequencing is done on a large scale (UK can take the lead here) and shares these globally (as I think has happened with covid-19).
All this stuff would help. Perhaps also with the pharma industry committing that whenever theses situations arise every below median GDP/capita country gets access to whatever vaccines are produced at cost.
