Ten­sions be­tween As­traZeneca and the EU re­gard­ing slowed vac­cine roll­out boiled over last week, when the bloc pub­lished a heav­i­ly redact­ed ver­sion of the com­pa­ny’s con­tract fol­low­ing crit­i­cism of its “best-ef­fort” pledges. But ea­gle-eyed in­ter­net sleuths and Ger­man jour­nal­ists found the blacked-out sec­tions could be eas­i­ly re­moved, prompt­ing the EU to pub­licly apol­o­gize.

Among the most note­wor­thy find­ings was that the con­tract it­self is worth £870 mil­lion, or about $1.19 bil­lion for the 300 mil­lion dos­es, in­clud­ing all di­rect and in­di­rect costs. There was al­so a par­tial­ly cut-off sec­tion that de­tailed how even though As­traZeneca is ob­lig­at­ed to sup­ply its dos­es at no prof­it, the com­pa­ny “shall not be re­quest­ed or re­quired to sup­ply the Vac­cine Dose…”

Ger­man mag­a­zine Der Spiegel was the first pub­li­ca­tion to pub­lish the rev­e­la­tions. The au­then­tic­i­ty of the redact­ed por­tions has been con­firmed by End­points News, though any­thing writ­ten af­ter “Dose” could not be re­cov­ered.

The con­tract al­so pro­vid­ed roadmaps for in­stances of es­ti­mat­ed costs ex­ceed­ing the £870 mil­lion fig­ure. There are two plans in place, should the ex­ceed­ed costs be ei­ther high­er or low­er than 20%, but the redac­tions block­ing out the plans them­selves could not be re­moved.

Ad­di­tion­al­ly, the doc­u­ment con­tained a pro­vi­sion for pro­vid­ing ad­di­tion­al dos­es at cost through Ju­ly 1, at which point As­traZeneca could de­ter­mine “in good faith” whether or not the pan­dem­ic was still go­ing on. That backs up re­port­ing from the Fi­nan­cial Times last Oc­to­ber say­ing the com­pa­ny can de­clare the pan­dem­ic over by that time and start mak­ing a prof­it on vac­cines de­liv­ered af­ter that date.

The redac­tion block­ing the pro­vi­sion it­self, how­ev­er, al­so could not be re­moved.

A Eu­ro­pean Com­mis­sion spokesman apol­o­gized to As­traZeneca at a press con­fer­ence Tues­day, say­ing “it was cer­tain­ly not our in­ten­tion for this to hap­pen,” per an EU­Ob­serv­er re­port. He added, “In or­der for those con­tracts to be con­clud­ed with the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies, it was agreed that cer­tain con­tracts would re­main con­fi­den­tial.”

The news comes af­ter a rau­cous week of back-and-forth be­tween one of the biggest drug­mak­ers in the world and the Eu­ro­pean gov­ern­men­tal body. As­traZeneca no­ti­fied the bloc late last month that it would de­liv­er more than 60% few­er dos­es than orig­i­nal­ly promised, blam­ing pro­duc­tion prob­lems at a Bel­gian fac­to­ry. That trig­gered fiery back­lash from the EU, which was al­ready deal­ing with de­lays of the Pfiz­er/BioN­Tech vac­cine and lags in vac­ci­na­tion.

Some crit­ics ac­cused As­traZeneca of sell­ing vac­cines in­tend­ed for Eu­rope to oth­er coun­tries at a high­er price. But CEO Pas­cal So­ri­ot main­tained the con­tract was based on a best-ef­fort de­liv­ery clause, a clause that has os­ten­si­bly been con­firmed by the re­moved redac­tions. That could ul­ti­mate­ly shield the com­pa­ny from le­gal ac­tion, as a hand­ful of mem­ber states like Italy and Poland have con­sid­ered su­ing Pfiz­er over sim­i­lar slow­downs.

The par­ties al­so en­gaged in a high­ly pub­lic tit-for-tat over whether or not a meet­ing be­tween the two would oc­cur. The EU had ac­cused As­traZeneca of pulling out of a meet­ing last Wednes­day, but it ul­ti­mate­ly went on as planned de­spite not re­solv­ing much.

For a look at all End­points News coro­n­avirus sto­ries, check out our spe­cial news chan­nel.

A group of drug regulators from Australia, Canada, Singapore, Switzerland and the UK on Tuesday unveiled their strategic plans for the next three years, laying out how they’ll work together on reviewing new drugs to reduce duplication across borders.

While understanding that the biopharma industry is truly global, the group, known collectively as the Access Consortium, seeks to better align their respective regulatory and policy approaches for pharmaceuticals, with an aim to facilitate faster access to high quality, safe and effective health products.

President Joe Biden’s administration on Monday revealed the distribution list for 55 million of the 80 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines America plans to donate to lower-income nations:

Roughly 14 million doses will head to Latin America and the Caribbean, for a list of countries that includes Brazil, Argentina, Dominican Republic, Panama and Costa Rica.
Another 16 million doses are headed to Asia to help the following countries: India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Maldives, Bhutan, Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Laos, Papua New Guinea, Taiwan, Cambodia, and the Pacific Islands.

Endpoints News turned five years old over the weekend. I wanted to mark the happy occasion by extending our deepest gratitude to Endpoints’ premium subscribers while outlining several other ways to support us as we go broader and get bigger this year and beyond.

Same as any business, we’ve got to create value and get paid for delivering it. So if you depend on Endpoints to stay abreast on biopharma developments, we depend on you too.

As the Biden administration tries to wrangle the details of its infrastructure bill, Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden (D-OR) took a concrete step forward on drug pricing reforms on Tuesday and unveiled five principles for such reforms, including providing Medicare with the ability to negotiate prices.

“Allowing the Secretary of HHS to negotiate the price Medicare will pay creates a much needed mechanism to achieve fairer prices when the market has failed to do so,” Wyden wrote.