Thread by @jonworth

So EMA has today approved the Halix plant 🇳🇱 where AZ 💉 is manufactured

What are the implications of this?

EMA announcement:
ema.europa.eu/en/news/increa…

A 🧵 explaining it

1/10

Background

The Halix plant has been shrouded in mystery - why has EMA not approved it?

FT tried to explain
ft.com/content/8e2e99…

NRC dug deeper still - Google Translate here
translate.google.com/translate?hl=&…

2/10

There is also no confirmation UK's MHRA has approved Halix either, but we know UK received 1 million doses from the plant, sometime before 31 Jan (matches the numbers given by Commission yesterday) - presumably these are stocked unused somewhere

reuters.com/article/us-hea…

3/10

But what about any further Halix production?

Turn the clock back to Monday, and the UK Govt was claiming in a @BrunoBrussels piece for The Times that UK is entitled to at least part of that production

thetimes.co.uk/article/ben-wa…

4/10

Halix has been part of the Oxford consortium from the start, and so UK Government assumes it is entitled to something from there based on its exclusivity deal that Hancock talked about with FT on Wednesday

ft.com/content/69eb41…

5/10

Later on Wednesday AstraZeneca put out a statement about the 29m doses discovered at Anagni 🇮🇹

13m are COVAX, 16m destined for EU, and *nothing* destined for UK

(statement says Europe, but confirmed it is EU by @JamesCrisp6)

astrazeneca.com/media-centre/p…

6/10

We also know that 10m of the 16m Anagni doses are about to be shipped to the EU, taking the Q1 AZ total to the EU to 29m, just shy of the 30m promised

*And* since then we have nothing new from UK Government laying claim to anything that's at Anagni

7/10

All that leads to the *assumption* but not the proof that any doses from Halix are not at Anagni, and that either production from that plant has been lower than expected *or* the doses from it were finished elsewhere, possibly Dessau 🇩🇪

8/10

The essential issue: how many Halix doses there are ready to ship, and where they are, is still unknown

And *were* any of these doses to be sent to 🇬🇧 we'd hear about it through the Commission export transparency system

9/10

One key piece of the jigsaw has fallen into place understanding this today, but the big issue - how many doses are there, where are they, and how many will go to 🇬🇧 (and will those get stopped) remain unanswered

10/10