actually 129 million Mateusz Morawiecki’s government has purchased COVID-19 vaccine doses (75 million from Pfizer/BioNTech, 20 million from Astra Zeneca, 18 million from Moderna, and 15 million from Janssen). We gave almost every tenth of it to other countries. The Ministry of Health announced.
A total of 12.8 million doses were donated in 2021-22. In 2023, we received 2.7 million doses of the Moderna vaccine, and it appears that they were partially used or discarded, as we are no longer giving away any free shipments. This year, we have received no shipments, and we have not given any away.
As Representative Plaszek calculated, The value of the donated vaccines is approximately PLN 1.3 billion. The following countries benefited: Armenia, Bangladesh, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Egypt, Philippines, Georgia, Iran, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, North Macedonia, Rwanda, Serbia, Taiwan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam.
But we not only donated, we also had to pay for the transportation. According to the data provided by the government, PLN 3.6 million was spent on this.
“It wasn’t enough that we bought up excess doses that no one needed. Then we distributed them, and the Polish taxpayer paid extra… for transportation! This is madness,” says the Confederate MP.
Where do these excess funds come from? In 2020-2021, the European Commission, led by Ursula von der Leyen, concluded purchase agreements for Covid-19 vaccines with pharmaceutical companies on behalf of EU countries. €2.7 billion was immediately released to establish a binding order. For more than a billion doses of vaccine.
The Commission later clarified that the relevant procurement decisions were taken by the national authorities of the Member States and that the Commission and its President were not involved in these proceedings. The European Commission’s translation resulted, among other things, from: allegations of a conflict of interest of President Ursula von der Leyen, whose husband is a director of Pfizer’s subsidiary Orgensis.
The committee reveals, but only part of it.
In 2021, MEPs requested access to these contracts and some related documents under the Access to Documents Regulation in order to understand their terms and ensure that the public interest is protected, as described in July this year by the Republic.
However, the Committee provided only partial access. They redacted some documents, claiming that this was done to protect business interests and the decision-making process.
Members of the European Parliament filed a complaint with the Court of Justice of the European Union to annul the blockade. The court partially upheld the complaints and invalidated the Commission’s decisions for irregularities.
Read also: Ruling on Covid-19 vaccine contracts. Unfavourable to Ursula von der Leyen
In April 2021, The New York Times reported on text messages von der Leyen exchanged with Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla in preparation for the vaccine order. In total, up to 1.8 billion doses of the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine were to be imported. At the announced prices, the deal would be worth up to €35 billion if fully implemented.
In January 2022, the EU Ombudsman accused the Commission of mismanagement for failing to comply with a request to make these letters public. The Commission did not confirm the existence of the letters, saying in its response that “short-lived and ephemeral documents are not kept.”
“Coffee enthusiast. Troublemaker. Incurable introvert. Subtly charming twitter scholar. Award-winning social mediaholic. Internet buff.”
