I don't think it's serious. Looking at this, there are the public timescales for both Lockdown (4 criteria) and vaccine rollout (April and July dates). Both look good at the moment, if not very good. Then there has been the briefing stuff, and it seems to me that ministers and their SPADs probably saw AZ UK and Pfizer schedule, added AZ India and hinted that end of March, early April would be a "bumper period". I don't think anyone has taken Moderna for granted since there is no established supply chain yet, so they were always out of this. AZ India seems to have hit the sort of problems that have bedevilled this huge first-time production problems that all the suppliers have had at some point, so it's not as bumper and they stopped the mission creep into the 40 year olds as a resul. But still, we're going to see a decent pace without it, and if Moderna comes on stream that will help, but usually the first set of consignments are quite modest in number.

The timing is justt very poor, in terms of overall optics, thanks to the President of the European Commission. It turns out what actually irked her was the fact that the previous UK - AZ agreement had allocated UK factories to the UK contract and effectively inhibits exports from the UK to EU (to cover AZ Europe factories' issues) until the UK has no critical need for the UK production. What she apparently wants is for that particular provision to be set aside, in order not to use the EU's rarely used powers in strategic interest, but there isn't an intention to switch off the taps completely. That's a political procurement point, which clearly rankles conceptually, but isn't the EU's biggest problem in my view, it's more about using the AZ supply they have already, and rebuiilding confidence in AZ, which has taken a real hammering however you look at it. As I say really poor timing and the author of that actually does know better.