None of the major vaccines would have been possible without international cooperation for sequencing, development, and testing....and the virus doesn't check your passport before it enters your cells.
Ultimately issues like competing contractual obligations can get ugly, fast. But aggressive vaccine nationalism can impede the kind of international collaboration that is necessary to produce enough product to inoculate everyone who wants a shot.
Normally vaccine exports are no problem for the EU, originally there wasn't even the mechanism that is now used to block that one shipment.
Given all the circumstances (various vaccine exports still going on, Australia having a pretty calm Covid situation right now and starting production of their own AZ vaccine this month) I wonder if that shipment was deliberately chosen as a statement to get AZ to stop playing games while minimizing the impact it has on global efforts. (or maybe I'm giving bureaucrats too much credit)
Of course a heads-up notice to Australia would have been nice if that was the case.
Without BioNTech, Pfizer would have partnered with a different company (Moderna, Novavax, the list goes on..) and produced a vaccine.
I don't mean to understate the value of what BioNTech's research set Pfizer (and the world) up for, but without Pfizer there would be no BioNTech vaccine.
This is just factually incorrect. BioNTech had the capability to produce a vaccine on their own, but not at the scale they needed to. Nor would they have been able to handle distribution. Previously they were only producing various mRNA medication at a much smaller scale.
Pfizer was in a better position to run a large-scale study and create new supply chains at the scale that was needed.
The relationship between BioNTech and Pfizer is not unlike the one between an artist and a music label.
Without them, BioNTech might have partnered with some other pharma corp: Merck (the German company, not the US wartime spinoff) is headquartered 30 km from BioNTech, Sanofi has facilities 20km away and there are a few more around the block that have significant experience in both navigating regulatory frameworks and ramping up production.
In such a scenario, maybe they wouldn't provide 60% of EU shipments now (the numbers I have at hands), but "produced nothing" seems to lowball it.
So while it isn't solely an EU effort, they were crucial in it's development.