The European Parliament’s Special Committee on Covid-19 and the Committee on Budgetary Control held a joint meeting on Monday 10 October to discuss the European Court of Auditors’ (ECA) report on vaccine procurement (see EUROPE 13019/11).
Monika Hohlmeier (EPP, German) opened the session, co-chaired with Kathleen Van Brempt (S&D, Belgian), by recalling that the European Commission had had to act at the beginning of the pandemic without being formally given competence. She called for lessons to be learned from this.
Joëlle Elvinger came to present the report for the ECA: “the experience is quite satisfactory, as this was the first pandemic the EU had faced”, she said, although the ECA pointed to room for improvement.
For example, the profiles of the steering board for vaccine procurement were very diverse, but did not include an expert in logistics and supply chain issues.
Ms Elvinger felt that the failure to provide pre-negotiation documents for the largest procurement contract (with Pfizer-BioNTech) had presented the ECA with a fait accompli and limited its work. According to her, the price negotiations were probably included in the documents that the Court did not receive.
Ms Elvinger added that apart from these specific documents, the ECA had had access to all the documents of all the “unredacted” contracts on a confidential basis. She made it clear that in the UK, contracts are not public. The EU, she said, has used public procurement procedures for its purchases, while the US has used the Defence Production Act and the UK can take similar measures.
Philip Wolfgang, Acting Director of the European Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority (HERA), who represented the European Commission, said that Member States had full access to the elements of the negotiation at all times during the process and had always had the possibility to withdraw from contracts until they were signed.
For the Commission representative, the reason why the cost of Comirnaty vaccines has increased from €15 to €19 is that each contract is different and the second contract was negotiated in a more competitive context. He said that the Commission had introduced more flexibility in the second contract (adapted vaccines, more flexible delivery schedules).
Pressed by MEPs’ questions on access to documents, the Commission representative read out a document stating that the Commission had assessed the requests for public access to documents and confirmed that the search for documents had not yielded any results. The Commission was also planning to publish new guidelines for its staff for better management of SMS and instant messages and might consult other institutions to do so.
He stressed that the Commission had done everything in its power to ensure the greatest possible transparency, but had to comply with the provisions of the contracts. (Original version in French by Émilie Vanderhulst)