The European Court of Auditors (ECA) published, on Monday 12 September, a report assessing the effectiveness of the European Commission’s purchases of Covid-19 vaccines on behalf of Member States. For the European auditors, the overall assessment of procurement management is positive.
The European Commission’s development of a flexible, centralised system for composing a diverse vaccine package enabled the EU to obtain the necessary vaccine doses at a time when little scientific data was available to judge the efficacy, safety and effective marketing of vaccines.
In order to better contribute to the development of the European response to future pandemics, the European auditors examined three elements: the establishment of the vaccine procurement framework, the negotiation strategy and the European Commission’s monitoring of the implementation of contracts. They also used comparisons with other existing procurement systems.
Between August 2020 and November 2021, the Commission had signed 11 contracts with eight vaccine manufactures for a total of approximately €71 billion and the supply of almost 4.6 billion doses.
The Court notes that the European Union started its procurement later than Britain and the United States.
The terms of each contract differ, the auditors point out. In a context of tight markets, in 2020, Member States complied with the general principles of the EU Product Liability Directive. The directive has served as a protection for the Commission, which was pressured by producers to accept concessions. However, Member States have agreed to take on some of the financial risks that should have been borne by the vaccine manufacturers.
The Court notes that the major elements of the contracts were mainly decided in the informal negotiation phase preceding the tender procedures. Despite its requests, the Court has not received the desired information on these preliminary negotiations. The Court notes that the tenders did not contain any criteria for identifying risks in the production and supply chain. However, contracts signed in 2021 contain more protective provisions than those signed in 2020.
The advance purchase contracts did not contain a provision explicitly guaranteeing priority access to vaccines for Member States. However, all contracts included a clause guaranteeing that the firms had not entered into any agreement that conflicted with the EU contracts. These provisions have evolved towards more protection over the course of the contracts.
The Court welcomes the establishment, albeit late, of the ‘The Task Force for Industrial Scale-up of Covid-19’, but notes that its impact on increasing vaccine production is unclear.
Finally, the Court of Auditors regrets that the Commission and the EU Council have not sufficiently evaluated the performance of procurement procedures and the use of the Emergency Support Instrument, nor have they studied the procurement systems of third countries to identify best practices. Furthermore, the proposal for a regulation for an emergency framework on medical countermeasures was not accompanied by an impact assessment or public consultation.
The Court of Auditors makes two main recommendations. Once the regulation for an emergency framework and the revision of the financial regulation have been adopted and best practices identified, the Court recommends guidelines on procurement during pandemics or a ‘lessons learned’ document for future negotiating teams. In particular, it recommends that the EU’s approach to pandemic procurement be subjected to a ‘stress test’, including a risk assessment and proposals for appropriate measures, and exercises to test and identify areas for improvement and weaknesses in the revised pandemic procurement framework.
Link to the report: https://aeur.eu/f/314 (Original version in French by Emilie Vanderhulst)