European Commissioner Ordered by Court to Disclose Correspondence with Pfizer CEO Regarding Shady COVID Vaccine Deal

The President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, suffered a significant defeat today at a top EU court, as a ruling has stated the executive body failed to explain why it denied a New York Times request to hand over text messages between von der Leyen and Pfizer's CEO.

The messages in question deal with the opaque, multi-billion-dollar COVID-19 vaccine contracts.

Reuters reported:

“Some EU lawmakers have criticized the Commission's handling of the deals signed the height of the pandemic, while good governance activists accuse the EU's executive body of a lack of transparency that could undermine trust in Europe's institutions.

The New York Times had requested access to text messages from Jan. 1, 2021 to May 11, 2022 between Commission President Ursula von der Leyen's and Pfizer's Albert Bourla in an effort to shed light on the multi-billion-euro vaccine deal.”

Critics of von der Leyen say that she is now in deep trouble, with outlets like Investigate Europe reporting that the price paid per dose was 15x the cost of production — which could imply that billions may possibly have been overpaid.

“Ruling on a challenge brought by the newspaper, the Luxembourg-based General Court - Europe's second-highest court - annulled that decision and said the Commission had not given a plausible explanation to justify not handing them over.

‘The Commission has not explained in detail the type of searches that it carried out to find those documents or the identity of the places where those searches took place’, it wrote in its ruling.”

The New York Times celebrated the ruling, while the European Commission will study the Court's decision before deciding on its next steps. Pfizer did not comment.

Associated Press reported:

“The [NYT] lawyers ‘succeeded in rebutting the presumption of non-existence and of non-possession of the requested documents’, according to a statement from the European Union’s General Court in Luxembourg.

The case highlights ongoing questions about oversight of the commission, which insists that text messages and other ‘ephemeral’ electronic communications do not necessarily constitute documents of interest that should be saved or made public.”

The Commission must explain why those documents cannot be found, the court decided.

“It said that the commission had failed to explain ‘in a plausible manner’ why the messages did not contain important information.

It also said that the commission ‘has not sufficiently clarified whether the requested text messages were deleted and, if so, whether the deletion was done deliberately or automatically or whether the President’s mobile phone had been replaced in the meantime’.”

The commission has two months to appeal to the European Court of Justice.