Executives emphasized it was too early to say what the decision on the vaccine's future or the outcome of the review would be.
"If you ask me, is the vaccine business a sustainable business for AstraZeneca for the next five or 10 years, that big strategic question is under discussion," Ruud Dobber, head of the BioPharmaceuticals business, told Reuters. "Hopefully before the year ends, we will have a better view how to move forward in the next few years."Production problems forced the company to cut deliveries to the European Union earlier in the year, prompting the bloc to launch a legal challenge.
It has delivered one billion doses around the world globally and is celebrated by the British government as a national success story of the pandemic. "There are still a huge number of basic questions we need to answer, moving forwards, and therefore, we're not in a rush in order to come to a final conclusion about what to do as a next step.""We are of course are going to look at the way forward, but we haven't got any specific timeline for this... our priority hasn't been to look at what we're going to do moving forward," he told analysts.