MEPs held a new debate on Covid-19 vaccination at the plenary session of the European Parliament on Tuesday 19 January. For more than two and a half hours, they took turns raising the EU’s main weaknesses and defending it against disinformation campaigns.
“How easy it is to blame the European institutions! (...) The truth is that the Commission has negotiated with the pharmaceutical companies in consultation with the Member States and in a context of uncertainty”, said Greens/EFA co-president Philippe Lamberts (Belgium). “The European Commission, on the other hand, can be criticised for having ceded to laboratories by keeping contracts secret. Opacity is an insult to democracy!”, he continued.
MEPs regret not being able to see the advance purchase agreements that the Commission has negotiated with the pharmaceutical industry on behalf of the Member States.
For the moment, out of the six contracts signed, they have only had very limited access to one of them, the one with CureVac. “Governments have been able to impose generalised lockdowns on the population, but you, you’ve been ‘carpetbagging’ the pharmaceutical industry, bravo!” said Marc Botenga, an MEP from The Left, adding that he regretted that MEPs’ phones had been confiscated, that parts of the contract had been crossed out, and that the MEPs were subject to a declaration of confidentiality to access the reading room for the CureVac contract. The redacted version of the contract has since been posted on the Commission’s website.
“Transparency is essential in order to combat disinformation and guarantee trust”, said the President of the S&D Group, Iratxe García Pérez (Spain).
“Like the Portuguese minister this morning in Parliament, I call on all Member States to make public the contractual figures for the delivery of vaccine doses country by country and month by month. This is the only way to know how many Europeans will be able to be vaccinated before the summer, to avoid rumours, false polemics and fake news”, Pascal Canfin (Renew Europe, France), chairman of the European Parliament’s public health committee, said on Twitter.
Commissioner for Health Stella Kyriakides said she is “100% in favour of transparency”, and she said she is working with the other pharmaceutical companies to achieve this. She then confirmed that BioNTech/Pfizer had agreed to publish its contract, before its communications department characterised this statement as a slip of the tongue and pointed out that only CureVac had so far agreed to publish a redacted version of its contract.
Link to the CureVac contract: https://bit.ly/38Vp8m8 (Original version in French by Sophie Petitjean, with the editorial staff)