Although I disagree that there was any reason to hold up UK approval, there was clear safety and effectiveness evidence that overwhelmed any doubts about safety in spite of the screw ups.
But I have zero sympathy for AZ even if many, many people are compounding their errors.
"This manufacturer has never released an approved vaccine"
and
"This manufacturer is not allowed to make a profit on this product, so there is no monetary incentive to ensure quality after the product is authorized for emergency use"
I fully expect the same quality as soviet era cars.
Hilariously Lada cars - the Soviet era cars being referenced I expect - were exported for the express purpose of making a profit!
What's Pfizer's reputation? Seems to be fine among the masses, despite decades of mismanagement and killing people.
Basically what seems to have happened is that Oxford university developed the vaccine, required that companies who wanted to manufacture and sell it should not make a profit, and therefore only got companies with little vaccine development experience, such as AstraZeneca, which probably due to their lack of experience has been making mistake after mistake.
That being said, we have seen that with COVID the vast majority of vaccines have been extremely successful (some like the Russian and Chinese ones were deployed without complete testing and were shown to have great results), and since we are confident the AZ vaccine is safe enough, ans we can see the impact in the UK, there’s a strong justification to authorize using it even without proper results.
Just not in the US, which already has access to enough vaccines for its population without needing the AZ zone.