As if the EU hadn’t bungled the vaccine roll-out enough, the bumbling bloc’s publication of their AstraZeneca vaccine contract has become another horror show after someone failed to properly redact the document. Opening the contract up on Adobe Reader, Guido was free to see beneath much of the mass-redactions via the programme’s widely used bookmarks feature.

Luckily for the EU, the juiciest section – that detailing how much they’d paid for the vaccine – remained impenetrable via the work-around. Unfortunately for the poor little EU, Guido already knows the dose prices after he spotted Belgium’s State Secretary for Budget and Consumer Protection tweeting the confidential information last month…

Read the “Cost of Goods” section in full below:

1.15. “Cost of Goods” means the fully burdened aggregate reasonable direct and indirect costs and expenses incurred by AstraZeneca to manufacture the Vaccine Doses, consisting of:

(a) direct labor costs (salaries, wages, employee benefits, overtime costs and shift premiums);

(b) direct materials (including raw materials and intermediates and interim packaging) costs;

(c) a fair and reasonable allocation of operating costs of facilities and equipment (including start up and cleaning costs of production), including an allocation of the cost of idle capacity at relevant manufacturing sites, in each case, calculated b…

(d) quality, release and in-process control costs;

(e) charges for reasonable spoilage, scrap or rework costs;

(f) amounts (without mark-up) that are paid to a third party, in connection with their manufacture of the Vaccine or any component thereof including any costs associated with technology transfer and/or establishment of manufacturing capacity;

(g) the reasonable allocation of facility overhead, both fixed and variable, to such manufacturing operation (including the allocable costs of administrators and managers overseeing manufacturing and production) maintenance, engineering, safety, finan…

(h) any non-refundable or non-creditable Indirect Taxes, customs and excise duties, or similar Taxes; and

(i) any royalties paid or payable to third parties in connection with the exploitation of the Vaccine, such royalties to be calculated as a percentage of the costs described in (a) through (h) above.

(a) costs and expenses for pharmacovigilance directly incurred for, or fairly allocable to, the Vaccine;

(b) regulatory filing fees for the Vaccine and other regulatory costs and expenses directly incurred for, or fairly allocable to, the Vaccine;

(c) supporting functions and the cost of working capital directly incurred for, or fairly allocable to, the Vaccine; and

(d) any other costs and expenses directly incurred for, or fairly allocable to, the Vaccine (e.g., legal, finance, reporting, compliance and executive management oversight).

(a) costs related to the operation of the facility incurred while using the facility to manufacture other products;

(b) industrial operations-related corporate costs (such as but not limited to corporate projects, strategic analysis);

(c) any refundable or creditable Indirect Taxes, customs and excise duties, or similar Taxes

(d) storage and distribution of the Vaccine;

(e) destruction for any material produced at risk; and

(f) costs and expenses directly incurred for, or fairly allocable to, post-launch safety and risk management studies for the Vaccine.