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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.
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While I was being cleaned up in the psychiatric hospital that protected me from being arrested again, the Supreme Court met and rightly ruled as follows: "The judgment of the District Court for Prague 1 of July 3, 1962 is annulled for violation of the law, since the sentence that the President of the Republic, Antonín Novotný, is an ox cannot be considered a cultural activity."
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I found the book while sorting through my ever-growing library, as if it had been waiting for me. I read it again. It is so well written that you can read it "in one breath". Vladimir Škutina's style just won't let you go until you finish it. I met him only once, in Zurich on 8.7.1989 at a discussion with Pavel Kantorek, which he moderated (I recommend the audio recording of the discussion!). JŠ
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Page 70: Then I experienced another case in my neighbourhood. A mathematics professor who was spending his fourteenth year in prison. He was withdrawn, made friends with no one, and patiently carried out all orders, even those that were absolutely nonsensical. Once I was sitting next to him while stringing coral and the professor confessed to me that I looked an awful lot like his son. I knew that the professor didn't receive any letters and didn't write any letters. He was arrested for espionage and treason. He had served as an airman in the RAF in England during the war and was arrested just after the Forty-eighth and had not yet had his trial in 1962. Much later I learned that his son had been shot trying to cross the border illegally, his wife died of cancer in 1949 and his daughter committed suicide.
The professor was terrified of amnesty. He dreaded the thought of leaving the prison gates and returning to the people. He was afraid that he would have to go to the places where he had lived and from where he had been dragged away for no reason. He knew he would never be able to return to his mathematics...
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I enclose a text by Jiří Krupička from Hana Lamkova's book SEARCHING FOR HOME - about a troubled century (pp. 258-275).
I quote: "In fact, almost in parallel with the increase in material standards, rich countries are experiencing an increase in mental illness, deviance and drug abuse. If the vision of a prosperous, socially just world for all people, with maximum leisure time for everyone, is realized, then only then will the question leap out in full force: What will people do in this paradise, what will they fill their free time with? No serious attempt has yet been made to answer this very fundamental question. The human mind needs nourishment and activity just as much as the body. The rich societies of today's world provide an appalling amount of bad, spoiled, or downright poisoned food, especially in their entertainment industry. The more the mind becomes idle, the more attractive, under the pressure of emptiness, bad and corrupt mental food becomes to people with an excess of leisure." - "How is it possible that such a rotten society rules the world? So ask many Muslims, scholars and ordinary people. But in their search for an answer to this question, they regularly forget a point whose omission colours their judgement in an entirely one-sided way. They do not ask, or dare not ask: how would our society fare if we criticized it as mercilessly as the West criticizes itself? If we began to pick out the worst features of our life and our culture and draw honest conclusions?"End quotes.
Unmanaged affluence, without respect for the laws of nature, always leads to tragedies, to a return to the beginning and to sanity. It will either be returned to the people, or mercilessly reminded by nature and her immutable laws. We are still just stating the wrong, unable to understand the real causes and prevent them in time. No wonder people are increasingly fond of animals - they know when they have had enough. Tomas Bata showed us a meaningful way. Shall we follow it, or shall we end up in the jungle as eternally unteachable creatures? We must each start with ourselves. JŠ
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From the book ROBERT'S RULES OF ORDER - Attempts to publish this book in the Czech Republic lasted fifteen years. It was published by the Institute for Political and Economic Culture with the support of the VIA Foundation under the "CEE TRUST - Strengthening the Nonprofit Sector" program and the Embassy of the United States of America in the Czech Republic. Unfortunately, we still lack the real elite that we have liquidated ourselves, and therefore the necessary strength to implement the ideas below. A job for generations with an uncertain end. JŠ
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I don't believe in own Czech way
I do not believe that the prevailing atmosphere of skepticism and small-mindedness needs to be overcome by patriotic pride. Indeed, there is nothing worse than false pride and the idea that a positive attitude towards the place and community in which we live is incompatible with a critical attitude towards oneself and one's fellow countrymen. False patriotism brings xenophobia, provincial self-centeredness and isolation from the outside world.
In other words, I belong to those unpatriotic people who believe that the main task of the Czech intelligentsia is not to seek its own Czech way, not to discover the discovered, but to humbly seek solutions that exist in developed societies. For I dare to distinguish between higher and lower civilizations, more advanced and more backward societies.
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Jiří Gruntorád is 71 years old, John Bok is 78 years old, Pavel Kohout is 95 years old and JUDr.Milan Hulík is 77 years old. This is how Pavel Kohout supported Jiří Gruntorád in writing and then in a telephone conversation. Both hunger strikers were also supported by Milan Hulík, whom I visited, on an audio recording. After the coup in November 1989, he interrupted his work in the legal profession and became director of the Inspection Department in the newly established Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Democracy, later renamed the Security and Information Service (BIS). Jiří Gruntorád takes the sign with him so that he can keep it in sight and use it again if necessary...
Jiří Gruntorád ended his hunger strike only after the government resolution by which the government subscribed to the traditions of Charter 77 was revoked, without addressing or consenting to its representatives! By its conduct and actions, it has not been worthy of them so far. Once again it has been shown what different worlds politicians and citizens live in. If politicians communicate with citizens only during elections and through the media, they will necessarily lose contact with citizens, including common sense. Prime Minister Fiala and Minister Jurečka were completely out of touch with reality in their personal conversations. The only one who was able to negotiate factually was Interior Minister Rakušan (in the photo Jiří Gruntorád just before leaving for a meeting with Rakušan). He promised to do what he could and to find a solution soon. He fulfilled his promise. Both public broadcaster ČT and Seznam.cz were silent this morning about the end of the hunger strike, at least not on the front pages...
Always, one act of an individual is more than hundreds of articles - they only diminish and dilute the value of the act. Only those who are capable of such acts themselves will understand this. Jiří Gruntorád acted fully in the spirit of Article 23 of the Constitution of the Czech Republic, when the democratic establishment of the country is threatened and a person has the right to resist, or the duty to resist, if democratic values are valuable to him.
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