Discharge 2024: General budget of the EU - Commission

Tabled by Virginie Joron, Julien Sanchez

Added: 7 a. Deplores the scandal of the President of the Commission purchasing 4.6 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines for EUR 71 billion and ordering an additional 146 million doses in 2024 for an unknown amount, while according to Politico, European countries had already admitted in 2024 that they had discarded 215 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines; - Recalls that the European Commissioner for Health testified before the COVI Special Committee on 27 March 2023 that President Von der Leyen was not involved in any negotiation of a contract for COVID-19 vaccines, contrary to the information published by the New York Times (28 April 2021) and the findings of the European Court of Auditors in its Special Report on the purchase of COVID-19 vaccines; - Recalls that the Commission required certain Members of Parliament, members of the COVI Committee, to sign a confidentiality undertaking on 30 May 2023 without specifying the end date of this confidentiality obligation concerning an allowance paid per dose by Europeans to Pfizer in exchange for the non-delivery of certain doses still to be delivered; - Deplores the persistent lack of transparency on the part of the Commission regarding the agreements it has concluded with the pharmaceutical companies responsible for the production of COVID-19 vaccines or Remdesivir, as well as the SMS communications between the President of the Commission and the CEO of a pharmaceutical company to the point that legal action has damaged the reputation of the Commission, when the President could easily have explained herself before Parliament; - Regrets the Commission’s failure to address the serious side effects of COVID vaccines on victims, particularly concerning medical research and compensation; - Notes that in the Pfizer case, the Court of the European Union (CJEU) ruled on 17 July 2024 that the Commission did not give the public sufficiently broad access to contracts for the purchase of COVID-19 vaccines; - Notes that in the SMS exchanged with Pfizer case, the Court of the European Union (CJEU) ruled on 14 May 2025 that Commission von der Leyen did not provide a plausible explanation to justify the non-possession of the requested documents or why it considered that the text messages exchanged in the context of the purchase of COVID-19 vaccines did not contain substantial information7a; - Is surprised that the Commission’s major financial errors in recent years (COVID vaccine contracts, Remdesivir, variable interest rates for the RFF, carbon tax fraud, etc.) have not been proactively investigated either ex ante or ex post to detect possible complicity or negligence; - Regrets that the Commission keeps prices and contracts secret (even for 2024 contracts) preventing parliamentary scrutiny of contracts; - Notes the extreme slowness of the European Public Prosecutor’s Office in the investigation into the purchase of COVID-19 vaccines and the EPPO’s persistent refusal to answer Members’ questions on the resources dedicated to the investigation or on the timetable or operations carried out complicating Members’ scrutiny of the Commission; - Regrets that the Commission chose to defend Pfizer rather than the Member States (Hungary, Poland, Romania) in the legal dispute between them over the refusal to order vaccine doses that became unnecessary after the end of the pandemic; - Notes that in 2026 Pfizer sought and obtained a judgment on a total of approximately EUR 2 billion from those States; Regrets that the Commission paid EUR 53 million7b to Pfizer in 2024; Regrets that the Commission compensated Pfizer for undelivered and possibly unproduced doses; Regrets that the Commission did not carry out any planned audits within 5 years of the signature of the contracts as long as the documents are available on the quality of the lots, the documentation provided by the manufacturers or other elements; - Requests a follow-up by the Commission in the form of a working group dedicated to the EUR 2 billion penalty imposed by Pfizer on Member States, as well as a final European Court of Auditors (ECA) special report to formally inform Parliament; 7a https://curia.europa.eu/site/upload/docs/application/pdf/2025-05/cp250060fr.pdf 7b https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/belgian-court-orders-poland-romania-buy-22-billion-pfizer-covid-vaccines-2026-04-01/; https://www.euractiv.com/news/hungary-poland-romania-to-face-pfizer-in-brussels-over-covid-vaccine-contracts/

Wording as published by the EP, in English. PE783.213