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AstraZeneca is desperately trying to take the heat out of an international row over vaccine allocations.

The EU is up in arms that while the UK remains "confident" it will receive its full order of 100 million doses of the jab developed with Oxford University, the company has downgraded its estimate for how many it will be able to supply to the EU.

Sources close to the company and also the government made the following points.

The European Medicines Agency hasn't even approved the AstraZeneca vaccine yet.

That approval is expected to be forthcoming this Friday. Any contract to deliver medicine would have been made subject to such approval.

AstraZeneca is not usually in the business of producing vaccines itself - the process has been largely outsourced to other makers.

The fact that the UK ordered its 100 million doses months ago and approved it weeks ago meant AstraZeneca was able to organise that supply chain.

Late ordering and the fact the EU is still yet to approve the drug means that supply chain is at a much earlier stage.

Given there is a biological process to go through - in other words, there are some parts of production you can't hurry, nature has to do its thing - supply contracts would always include "wiggle room" and be on a "best efforts basis".

AstraZeneca seems confident they are not in legal breach of any contract.

The pharmaceutical giant is not making any money out of this.

It has promised to supply the drug at cost wherever the vaccine is sold in the world.

Another reason the sources feel it's very unfair is AstraZeneca has gone from being viewed as having pulled off an almost miraculous feat of innovation, while not profiting, to being thrust into the white heat of an unseemly international scramble for vaccines.

A scenario that one source admitted was probably always inevitable, given the stakes involved, and the undivided attention of the citizens of all countries of the world.