At business schools, it will be talked about for a long time. The pandemic was supposed to be an opportunity for AstraZeneca to land in a big way in a sector from which it had always been excluded, that of vaccines, with the cheaper, easier to use anti-Covid discovery, destined to become the basic vaccine of the future. Instead, for the Anglo-Swedish giant and even more so for its customers, it is turning into a nightmare. On the stock market, the stock has already lost 20 percent and, probably, the decline is not over. Above all, customers have plunged into a brutal alternative. Or the (few) vaccines available are used for the second dose to the millions of Brits who have already received the first en masse. Or they are given to the millions of Europeans who are still waiting for the first dose and are in the dark of the third wave.
If there were time, the dispute between London, Brussels and AstraZeneca would be resolved in court. Because London is trying to turn it into a kind of litmus test of the credentials of the free market and the capitalist system. Therefore, blocking vaccine exports in the name of national needs, as Brussels intends to do, is a protectionist attack on international coexistence. Reaching the same result, instead imposing halter contracts on the manufacturers, so they cannot export until their internal needs have been met, is efficient and legitimate. This, in fact, says the contracts signed by London not only with AstraZeneca, but with the other protagonists of the vaccine industry. In a contract signed just over a month ago with Wockhardt, a company specializing in filling, it is specified that the company “will guarantee sufficient supplies to protect the British in the long term”.
The result of the free market in the English version, as EU leaders never tire of pointing out, is that, since December, Europe has made available to its citizens only 88 million doses of the vaccine, but has exported 77 million. , of which 21 million to Great Britain which, in exchange, has not exported even one to Europe. The geopolitical reality is, in fact, that the EU, even with the restrictions just put in place, has remained the only one, among the large producers, to export vaccines. The United States does not export it, which has never made a secret of the “America first” principle. China does not. India has just abruptly decided not to, again in the name of national needs. And, in fact, Great Britain did not and continues not to do so: Europe arrives at “vaccine nationalism” not first, but last.
Vaccine nationalism is precisely the banana peel on which Pascal Soriot, the boss of AstraZeneca, has slipped, with the carelessness of his promises, probably based, to a large extent, on the belief that he can count on production in India and China. The problem with vaccine nationalism, however, is that the system holds up as long as someone – in this case Europe – evades the strategy and continues to export. Because the vaccine industry worldwide is both extremely concentrated and extremely interconnected.
In all, the Vaccine Club is made up of 13 countries, where 91 percent of the subsidiaries of the pharmaceutical giants in the sector are concentrated: in addition to the five actors already mentioned, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Japan, Korea, Russia and Switzerland . Three-quarters of the exports of vaccine ingredients, however, go to just five countries. At the same time, the countries of the Vaccine Club are, together, the most important source and final destination of vaccines. If you look at trade in general, on average each of the 13 countries acquires 68 per cent of their imports from some of the other 12 in the Club. But, in the case of vaccine consignments and their ingredients, this share within the Club exceeds 88 percent. It means that if the chain is broken, it becomes difficult for everyone to produce vaccines. But good will, they point out in Brussels, cannot be one-sided.
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