A recent court order requiring disclosure of the South African COVID-19 vaccine procurement contracts has caused a stir in social media and raised hopes that some of the secret clauses offering special protection to manufacturers might finally be revealed. The Romanian Member of the European Parliament Cristian Terhes, who has long criticised Ursula von der Leyen and the EU Commission for publishing heavily redacted versions of the EU’s own procurement contracts, hailed the ruling in a tweet as a “huge win for transparency and accountability”, pointing, in particular, to the inclusion of the all-important ‘Pfizer’ contract among the documents to be released.
But why the excitement? The EU’s own procurement contract or Advanced Purchase Agreement (APA) with the consortium of Pfizer and the German company BioNTech has been available online in unredacted form for well over two years now: since, more precisely, April 2021, just shortly after vaccine rollout. It does indeed contain hair-raising clauses, which would undoubtedly have provoked massive opposition and ‘vaccine hesitancy’ had they been more widely known.
Consider, for instance, the following clause from Article 1, paragraph 4, of the Vaccine Order Form which is appended to the APA: “The Participating Member State further acknowledges that the long-term effects and efficacy of the Vaccine are not currently known and that there may be adverse effects of the Vaccine that are not currently known.” (See full paragraph below.) How many Europeans would have rushed to take the vaccine or even consented to take it if they had known that?
But they did not know it. For here is what the same paragraph looks like in the redacted version of the APA posted by the European Commission.
This ‘acknowledgement’ clause in the order form – acknowledgement, in effect, that the manufacturers knew neither if the vaccine was safe nor if it was effective, at any rate in the long-term – is in addition to the clauses which already provide the manufacturers extremely wide-reaching indemnification in the section on indemnification of the contract proper. See, for instance, the excerpt from Article I.12.1 below.
Read More: The Scandalous EU Contract with Pfizer-BioNTech
