To be honest, it was the mutations bit of the hoarding complaint that always confused me. The moral case that we were vaccinating people who were unlikely to die, while people who were at high risk of death were left unprotected - that one I understood.
I don't really understand the mutations bit of the argument though. If the thought is that the vaccine either help stop infection or stops it faster in an individual, so less opportunity to mutate - why would a case in the UK be better than a case in a less vaxxed country? Maybe I'm missing something.
Vaccine technology/production hoarding though - that's a different matter. It became a huge deal as soon as the mRNA efficacy trial results came out. It immediately put massive pressure on their ability to ramp up and they (understandably) hoarded every relevent supply chain component - from specialist lipids to reactor liners to super deep freezes.
Meanwhile, more conventional vaccines, like the inactivated virus ones were getting more conventional efficacy results. That doesn't mean they were rubbish though, just that they weren't the superstar performers. They were however the kind of vaccines that could have been produced at a lot more sites, including plant in Africa.
That perception of inferior v superior even undermined AZ, but it was worse for the old technology vaccines. Things like vaccine passports actually reinforced that perception - with lots of vaccine types effectively leaving people "unvaccinated" in the eyes of the world and inevitably impacting both availability and take-up.
When we do get some breathing space, the world will need to look at this is the light of the next pandemic. New capacity, new production locations, new agreements on how approvals work. The German government effectively sponsored Biontech's development work, Pfizer developed and built massive production capacity - and it was great that they could. But not enough to deal with an unprepared world.
