Technofreak:
Personally I lean towards the incompetency option. I don't buy the misstep of an aide making a mistake. There would have been multiple discussions around the delivery schedule which as the minister he would have been part of. He should have know the correct date. If he didn't.....?
As much as I don't want this to be a conspiracy, the fact we seemingly have confusion over a date still doesn't explain other things.
For months there has been talk around our freezer capacity and only being able to store 4m doses meaning we would need to push back our final orders through to October as we had insufficient capacity to store the whole order if it was received in September. We've even talked about it in this thread.
What if this is what we have done, and now we're now frantically trying to get those doses we might have pushed back here earlier?