Britain to spend $5 billion on vaccines and bear liability, watchdog says

LONDON, Dec 16 (Reuters) - Britain has agreed to spend 3.7
billion pounds ($4.93 billion) on COVID-19 vaccines and in most
cases will bear the liability if claims are made against the
pharmaceutical firms involved, the National Audit Office (NAO)
said on Wednesday.

The government has agreed supply deals for 357 million doses
of seven different candidate shots, but has not gone into detail
about how much it has spent or indemnity agreements, citing
commercial confidentiality around the contracts.

The NAO said the business ministry had signed firm deals for
five of the candidates, including the Pfizer/BioNTech shot which
has already been approved and is being rolled out, as well as
those developed by Oxford/AstraZeneca, France's Valneva, Novavax
and Moderna.

Britain also has deals in principle for
Sanofi/GlaxoSmithKline's shot as well as Johnson & Johnson's
candidate.

The government has invested in the development and clinical
trials of some of the vaccines it has agreed supply deals for,
and agreed to indemnify the firms against liability.

Those agreements mean that in four of the five finalised
contracts, there was no cap on how much the government could pay
if there is a successful claim against one of the companies, the
report said.

The NAO said the business ministry agreed upfront payments
of 914 million pounds on the five contracts it has signed, prior
to regulatory approval of any of the vaccines.

Only one of the contracts provides for a full refund of the
upfront payment if the vaccine fails to achieve regulatory
approval.

The NAO noted that the government had worked "quickly and
effectively" to secure vaccines, demonstrated when Britain
became the first country in the world to deploy Pfizer's
vaccine last week.

"We have worked at a pace and scale never been done before
to ensure the British public receive a vaccine that meets strict
safety standards as quickly as possible," a spokeswoman for the
business ministry said.

In all, the total cost of purchasing and deploying vaccines
was uncertain, the NAO said, but estimated that it could cost up
to 11.7 billion pounds.

($1 = 0.7505 pounds)
(Reporting by Alistair Smout; Editing by Tom Brown)