Jan Šinágl angažovaný občan, nezávislý publicista

Pharmaceutical firm Pfizer sued Poland this month over its refusal to pay for vaccines the Polish government bought under a contract between the European Commission (EC) and Pfizer for 1.1 billion doses for member states.

The exact wording of the contract, including the price of the vaccines, is officially secret, but according to the Financial Times, the value of a single dose is said to be around €19.5. Given that Poland has not taken delivery of 60 million vaccines, the total amount recovered can be expected to be around €1.2 billion. The contract with Pfizer was signed by the EC in April 2021, with the support of EU member states. They have committed to buy 650 million doses from Pfizer in 2022 and 450 million doses in 2023. However, demand for vaccines has fallen sharply over the past year.

Central and Eastern European countries, except the Czech Republic, have asked the EC to amend the contract

In 2022, CEE governments began to argue that they had a large stock of vaccines. And if they buy more, they say they will have to destroy millions of doses as the guarantee expires. This has led to the shredding of millions of vaccines in this country too. According to our investigation, vaccines worth a total of CZK 11.6 billion have been purchased in the country. The largest share of these were vaccines from Pfizer. A large proportion of these vaccines were disposed of. More than 7 million doses, worth more than CZK 3.5 billion, had to be destroyed at taxpayers' expense. In the summer of 2022, a coalition of 10 countries (Poland, Bulgaria, Estonia, Croatia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia) asked the EC to negotiate a contract modification with Pfizer. According to these countries, it was, among other things, "a waste of public funds that cannot be reasonably explained to the public". Contractual changes were agreed between the EC and Pfizer and the revised contract from May this year will allow countries to buy fewer vaccines but at a higher price per unit. Except for Poland, all nine countries have signed the revised contract.