EU court adviser: Commission lacked transparency on Covid vaccine contracts

The European Commission should have been more transparent with the public about its multimillion-euro Covid vaccine contracts, an EU court adviser said.

Advocate General Athanasios Rantos said it was impossible to tell whether the Commission staffers negotiating these contracts with drugmakers were impartial, given that the EU executive only published “anonymised versions of declarations of no conflict of interests.”

The Commission’s lawyers had argued at the Court of Justice of the EU that revealing who exactly worked on the contracts could have opened them up to abuse from “conspiracy theorists.”

A “lack of trust” about the contracts meant EU officials could have been subjected to “physical or psychological” harassment, Commission lawyer Antonios Bouchagiar told judges at the Luxembourg court at a hearing in March.

The case reached the top-tier EU court after the Commission decided to fight a 2024 ruling from the EU’s General Court (a lower court), which said that the EU executive should have provided more details about the lucrative contracts — and the people negotiating them — when asked to do so by a group of Green MEPs and members of the public.

The Commission signed six advance purchase agreements with pharmaceutical companies at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021, promising to buy a set number of vaccine doses for European citizens as part of the EU’s bloc-wide approach to tackling the virus.

The Green lawmakers said the public deserved to know more about how those contracts — worth millions of euros — were negotiated.

When the MEPs made their requests for access to documents, the Commission published redacted information, removing the names of the people working on the negotiations as well as certain contractual clauses.

The Green lawmakers took the Commission to court, as did more than 3,000 members of the public, many of them skeptical about the EU’s approach and some of whom were hostile to mass vaccination policies.

Thursday’s opinion is not binding, but it will inform the final decision at the Court of Justice of the EU. A date for that ruling hasn't been confirmed.

It’s another blow for the Commission in an access to documents court case. Last year, the General Court ruled that the EU executive was wrong not to reveal the text messages sent between Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and the CEO of Pfizer, in a case that became known as Pfizergate.