The job of negotiation is to get a good deal for all. Price is only one part of that - if you only focus on price bad things happen. too low a price and the supplier goes out of business before you get all the product. Too low a price and your supplier doesn't have enough profit to remain in business for the next time you need something. Too low a price and the supplier won't negotiate with you at all next time you need something.

Of course too high a price has issues as well. It is important to pay attention to price. Sometimes you need to break away from a deal because it will never work out.

Long term the best deals are win-win.

A negotiation can be for anything: it could be to include additional safe-guards in the contract for example...

You could even negotiate a higher price in exchange for something more valuable (for example, paying extra per vaccine in exchange for building more capacity sooner...)

A "Commission President Ursula von der Leyen sends negotiators to get highest vaccine price worldwide!" headline would be even worse for the negotiators political career than "[She seeks] to Duck Responsibility". They aren't going to negotiate higher prices on a vaccine in a global emergency.

Why not? Israel did just that, they offered double the US price for their doses + full access to the medical data.

They vaccinated half their population whilst the EU is stuck making a surprised Pikachu face.

True, but do note Israel’s population is 1/50 of Europe, so the logistics of accommodating it (on the producer side) are relatively easy.

Yes, but the GDP of the EU is $19 trillion, the GDP of Israel is $350 billion, that’s 1/50th of the population and 1/54th of the GDP.

While I’m aware that things don’t scale the same, and that currently the supply chain has its own hard restrictions on production you can’t argue that paying more won’t allow you to ramp up production faster, this is also what the UK did.

The EU could’ve allocated much more funding and ordered much more doses of both approved vaccines and vaccine candidates they haven’t they’ve put most of the eggs in the AZ basket and then tried to haggle on the price of the cheapest vaccine sold at cost.

Most definitely agree. I was only referring to the fact that for Israel it was sufficient to throw more money at the problem to get enough doses; For the entire EU, it is required, but not sufficient condition.

Fast, good, cheap. Pick two.

Their job is to make the appropriate choices. In this situation cheap is not a priority due to the costs of delay.