It wasn’t just Karl Lauterbach who radically overdid it: the EU’s pathological spending spree on the joint procurement of Covid vaccines is now taking revenge. The states are complaining about a massive surplus of vaccine doses – but further deliveries of the Pfizer vaccine are contractually agreed. The US pharmaceutical giant has now mercifully deigned to offer a 40 percent reduction in the doses to be delivered. However: He also wants to be paid for goods that will never be manufactured.
According to a report in the Financial Times, Pfizer has offered the EU a contract amendment that would reduce the number of vaccine doses to be delivered by 40 percent and delay deliveries. This is being sold as a conceding by the pharmaceutical giant after EU states had complained about the mass of useless vaccine doses: as is well known, hardly anyone is more interested in corona vaccinations, because they are neither effective nor safe. The so-called pandemic is long gone anyway. The consequence: the expensively bought vaccine has to be destroyed.
The real scandal, however, is that Pfizer – which is losing a lucrative source of income as a result of the rapidly falling demand for the experimental gene therapy drugs against Covid-19 – does not want to cut back on payment: According to the Financial Times, the company now insists on paying for contract orders Cans that will never be made. As is so often the case, exact details are not known because the contract is not published.
The controversial EU Health Commissioner Stella Kyriakides finds the procedure in order. “By working together, we have achieved a significant reduction in doses, a time extension of our contract well beyond 2023, and security of supply should more doses be needed,” she said. “If we want to change the vaccine deliveries, we need a deal.” The further squandering of taxpayers’ money from the EU countries (with the Germans as the largest donor) obviously does not bother them.
Meanwhile, Kontra came from Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary and Lithuania. The responsible health ministers called for better contracts to be negotiated: “In our opinion, these proposals do not represent a final and fair solution to the problems of the Covid-19 vaccine surplus and do not correspond to the needs of the health systems, the needs of the citizens and the financial interests of the Member States,” says a joint statement.
Poland already stood in the way last year and neither accepted nor paid for new vaccine deliveries. Poland’s Health Minister Adam Niedzielski denounced that the deal favored pharmaceutical companies, not EU citizens. He also demanded the publication of the confidential contract.
“The proposed Pfizer amendment to the Pfizer Agreement is clearly unacceptable for us given the critical situation of the oversupply of vaccines in Bulgaria and the unjustified financial burden on products destined for destruction,” said Bulgarian Health Minister Assen Medzhidiev.
Countries that do not agree to the treaty changes will remain bound by the original terms, according to the FT. Interestingly, the fact that the Pfizer vaccine is not only useless, but can actually also be classified as catastrophic in terms of quality and safety, is not mentioned. Big pharma obviously still enjoys the freedom of fools in the EU.