Speeches

This is a big topic! Surveillance is important. And indeed, today we have legislation at national level that already regulates this surveillance aspect. The problem is the drift associated with the use of these new tools. Biometrics may be useful for some services, especially at airports, to facilitate passage, but it needs to be regulated. We also have to see which company uses this type of data because we know it very well, it is data that is important and some companies use it. This was seen in the Facebook case: that company resold the data obtained to other organisations. So yes, supervision, it needs to be supervised and we will continue to do so. But we need to know what use to make of it, which is why we need to regulate it; it is necessary to be there as a safeguard against those who use these useful means for society. This has been seen in the case of the COVID crisis: there have been abuses, with discrimination against certain populations. In my opinion, this is the risk for the future, if we put this in the hands of, say, authoritarian services and authorities.

Madam President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, you wanted to include the QR Code in the body of our fellow citizens. No transportation, no medical care, no nightclubs, standing cafes, sitting, lying down or dynamic beach. July 12, 2021 will remain for France a black day for our freedoms. This temptation of the QR Code and social credit in the Chinese way, some dream of it here. The temptation to deprive liberties and access to public services and care, the temptation to identify obedient citizens and punish deviant citizens by blocking their bank accounts, such as in Canada, China or Italy. Obviously, we know the digital facilities, and I would have no fear in a democracy-friendly state. But we lived with COVID an authoritarian drift on convictions that turned out to be wrong. Yes, digital identity can drag us to another model of society. And I will end with this passage by George Orwell, in his book "1984", which predicted the total surveillance by the cameras of Big Brother: ‘Winston could still decipher on the façade the artistic inscription of the three slogans of the Party: WAR IS PEACE/ FREEDOM, IS SLAVERY/IGNORANCE, IS FORCE". Welcome to 2024! (The speaker agreed to answer a blue card question)

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, Commissioner, some of you met with lobbyists here in Strasbourg last month with Moderna and BioNtech and this week you will probably see others. FleishmannHillard works for Pfizer and has 63 lobbyists with an EP badge. Medtech Europe, a new lobby for the digital health market, has already met with the Commission 40 times. This von der Leyen commission thus ends as it began: under the sign ‘Big Pharma’. After billions of contracts secretly arranged with Pfizer-BioNtech Moderna, CureVac, Gilead, after the wasted trash doses, here they want to change the pharmaceutical regulations in their favor. Today we are talking about patents, supplementary protection certificates. Of course, we are in favour of research in Europe, but we must dare to tell the truth: it is a bandage on a wooden leg. For 20 years, which industrialist has invested in European researchers? The result is production going to India and China, with the dogma of generics, and shortages here of essential medicines. So the pharmaceutical cartel found the parade. To make small profits, it is easier to create shortages, to do tax evasion, to make a fake publication to kill an old medicine, easier to do two-month clinical studies instead of two years to find no side effects, easier to convince some bureaucrats by pernicious lobbying. The urgency is to regain control of this sector. Covid-19 bingo has short-circuited all the usual procedures and has spawned bad habits, naive or complicit, in some authorities. Our health must not become a funfair where the illusionist pockets you and disappears.

Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, the von der Leyen presidency will have been the mandate of the moral slide, and, as you well know, when morality slides, public debts unravel. Some here tell me that I talk too much about Pfizer-BioNTech’s €71 billion vaccine contracts, that I talk too much about hidden text messages, hidden prices and, today, wasted doses. But it was your parties that decided not to invite the President to explain to this Parliament. It was your parties that decided not to condemn these behaviours and not to remove the badges of Pfizer lobbyists, despite the refusal of its CEO to testify on the biggest contract in the history of the European Union. Result: Brussels Commission officials do not report publicly on their meetings with tobacco industry representatives in Davos or Brussels. It is not me who says it, it is the European Ombudsman. In its decision of 19 December, it specifically appointed the administrators of the internal market, for whom Mr Breton is responsible, and an employee of Michel Barnier. I quote: “The Commission did not keep minutes of all meetings that took place in 2020 and 2021. The Ombudsman therefore wonders how the Commission can reassure the public that its interactions with tobacco lobbyists do not undermine public health policies [...] if minutes do not exist.” In the face of these lobbies and temptations, we are not asking for holiness, but Europe is not destined to become a banana republic of oblique right.

Mr President, Minister, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, the biggest thing is to have believed that these new digital laws would protect our internal market from defective Chinese inflatable dolls or fake Rolexes from the Philippines. Indeed, since the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk, it has become the main obsession of the Commission, which absolutely wants to protect us from the Great Evil X. A few days ago, Ms von der Leyen told Davos that the main concern for the next two years was not conflict or climate, but disinformation or misinformation, and that this had been her priority since the beginning of her mandate, with the Digital Services Act and the definition of the responsibility of large internet platforms for the content they promote and propagate, statements supported by Emmanuel Macron in Sweden. So exit the climate, exit the armed conflicts, exit the pandemics, and haro on disinformation, this evil of the century that, in your opinion, spawned Brexit, Donald Trump and, why not, the 2005 referendum. 2024 is an important year, as you said, when half the world will be called upon to vote, to express its choice, even when it displeases the camp of the good. The camp of good is those who decide to set up in this democratic forum a cordon sanitaire against those who do not rank behind the right, Macron, the socialists, the greens or the left, this wonderful little world that is recovering from the prizes of the best MP. The freedom to express your opinion, in the end, is this information that you do not control and that hinders you, under the guise of fighting disinformation or illegal content. A political party, a different discourse on COVID-19 does not suit you? Illico is censorship. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 marked the fall of the communist regime in Europe, with its procession of propaganda tools. Trente-cinq ans après, vous reprenez ces mêmes recettes staliniennes avec ce nouveau ministère de la vérité pour contrôler le récit politique et la censure 4.0. Big Brother is watching you.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, Commissioner: , as our former colleague Radek Sikorski, Chair of the Delegation for relations with the United States, said after the explosions that hit the Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea. This delegation, through which Washington tells us that, in order to regain our autonomy in semiconductors, we must conclude a treaty with Taiwan. Thank you, USA. Microsoft is recovering the market for our health data, the few industries that we have left are exiled to the United States thanks to the attractive subsidies offered there, Pfizer obtained the vaccine market until 2027, we even almost had an American woman at the head of the protection of European competition, and today we are pleased to be the first in the world to have standards on artificial intelligence while our main competitors sell us artificial intelligence. Thank you, USA. Solar panels are the same. Commissioner, you gave us an unhappy picture of the situation of the European solar industry: Congratulations! But the finding is not new: Ms von der Leyen seems to worry only when German companies complain and when Mr Meyer Burger relocates. You are now discovering that the only company left in Europe will go into exile in the United States. You are responsible for this industrial disaster. You surfed on crises to finish us off, to destroy the little independence we had, when we were proposing, with amendments, the defence of our national jewels. You have destroyed French nuclear power, our cheap energy for our industry and our fellow citizens. It was absolutely necessary to close Fessenheim, abandon Astrid to Bill Gates. Result: electricity and gas prices are skyrocketing, and we have become an industrial desert. Now you have come to tell us that this is terrible. Finally, wind turbines, solar panels, German or Spanish plants are unable to do so. This administration is not a strategy, it is a tragedy; it is the opera-comic of sovereignty. On the purchase-waste of COVID-19 vaccines, on billions of variable rate loans, on the agricultural issue: 90% of the problems are in Brussels. But "thank you, USA". And a tip to our German friends is to buy Emmanuel Todd’s latest book. The Defeat of the West.

Madam President, Mrs von der Leyen is in Davos at the moment to restore confidence. But what a confession! Yes, let’s talk about fraud, since nobody talks about it. The Brussels Commission published the BIP, its annual report on the protection of financial interests, with a total of around €2 billion of fraud in 2022. But one line is missing in the table: the fraud line in Brussels. No conflict of interest, no free travel to Qatar, no influence trading. Saint Brussels, pray for us. The Pfizer-BioNtech giant contracts case revealed a culture of opacity, impunity and incompetence. €71 billion, ten doses per person, doses that continue to be purchased while already €4 billion have been discarded. Restoring trust. How can we describe the scene of the European Public Prosecutor’s investigation into SMS messages where there is a hesitation between the stealth inspector and the ghost of the opera? What I see is that Mrs von der Leyen was unable to interrupt the huge sums paid to Pfizer-BioNtech. But in 2023, it blocked EUR 1,000 per Erasmus student funding with Hungary, penalising 40,000 Hungarian and European students. Weak with the strong and strong with the weak. That is why I voted against fraud but for Hungary.

Madam President, Madam Ombudsman, Commissioner, the bubble of illusion is about to burst. The illusion of fabulous Pfizer contracts, wonderful stocks, this bubble will burst. And it is also thanks to the European Ombudsman that I warmly welcome: you have fought with talent for transparency against a champion administration of mismanagement. Brussels, this administration which gives red cards to certain Member States, forgets its duties. No response on SMS, no response on risk-benefits among young people, no response on dose stocks or prices. The opacity assumed, the suspicion of conflicts of interest, the systematic avoidance of responsibilities signal a leakage forward. Mr rapporteur, congratulations on your report, which dares to quote Pfizer. Mr Terheş, your amendments are excellent. Ms O’Reilly, you have rightly investigated and criticised the Commission for its lack of transparency and accountability. More broadly, as we have understood, it is the culture of service and respect for fundamental rights that are at stake. Let us list each year the podium of the Commission’s less transparent services, such as the Directorate for Health, which, after the revolving door of its director in a US laboratory, after the Pfizer contract scandal, why is the Commission hiding documents relating to the European Health Data Space, or the documents promised at the hearing by Emer Cooke, the director of the European Medicines Agency? As for your survey on the tobacco lobby and the WHO, it is very useful and thank you very much. Let's also look at the lobbies of pharmaceutical companies and the foundations of Bill Gates. Madam Ombudsman, once again, thank you for your very valuable work and also for your service and I wish you good luck and, above all, my best wishes for this new year.

Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, for once I agree with my colleagues. When a petition arrives here, when citizens complain, the Commission does not act on it because, supposedly, these complaints concern individual cases or various facts. This is also the attitude of the European Medicines Agency and your Brussels administration, which counts 12,000 deaths and millions of side effects of vaccines against COVID-19, Pfizer and others, without drawing the consequences and which hide the information from the public at the bottom of a drawer. The Commission's current approach of not giving access to documents and SMS, of ignoring petitions, of ignoring citizens by sending petitions back to countries, results in the blocking of procedures for years in the pre-litigation phase, without transmission to the courts and without access to essential documents. Faced with this opaque bureaucracy of Brussels, the best defense is the attack, as the Emperor Napoleon said. Let us talk about the latest report of the European Court of Auditors on public procurement in Europe. Every year, some €2 trillion is procured. The Court concludes that the duration of administrative proceedings has doubled in ten years. Neither Eurostat nor the Commission monitors public procurement prices. The level of competition has decreased over the last decade. Two key indicators are used by the Court to measure non-competition between public contracts: no invitation to tender and single tenderer. Does that remind you of anything? Me, it reminds me of the contracts for the purchase of COVID-19 vaccines with these prices and secret clauses. Finally, I will quote the Court of Auditors: Since public procurement involves large sums of public money, there is a risk of fraud and corruption. In public procurement, transparency is therefore essential to ensure that decision-makers are all held accountable for their actions. The European Ombudsman asked us last week to fight corruption and she is right. This must be a priority for all of us, and Qatargate must not hide the Pfizergate.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, we are going to vote to ban the vacuum on both sides, to bring containers of wine, milk and cattle from New Zealand. Brussels therefore wants to ban vacuum in cartons, ban camembert boxes or fruit crates. So like you, if I were a bureaucrat in Brussels, I would also force children to finish their Lego in shops to avoid these useless boxes. If I were a bureaucrat, I would impose a single size for cabin suitcases. If I were a bureaucrat, I would replace steaks with insects because cows threaten Argentinian glaciers. I would also ban fuel-powered cars and cheap planes. If I were a bureaucrat, I would also ban Twitter and put in place widespread surveillance. I would also ban the words ‘Christmas’, ‘Madam’, ‘Sir’, ‘He’, ‘She’. It is with these methods that bureaucrats find themselves banning our camembert boxes because they saw plastic waste on a beach during their holidays in Bali. Of course we are in favour of recycling packaging and against these useless plastics. We already have a law in France, so let the French live in French, and the Europeans live in Europeans.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, after decades of industrial destruction, it is time to repair Europe. With this proposal, the European Commission wants to ensure that more products are repaired under the legal guarantee. It also wants consumers to have easier and cheaper options to have products repaired when the legal guarantee has expired. Indeed, we have all realized this with planned obsolescence, spare parts that cannot be found or are more expensive than the device. This has also been seen with companies like Apple pushing for overconsumption with the release of new mobile phones every six months. We share the objective of encouraging practices promoting the circular economy, where an informed consumer would first choose to repair a product before replacing it, mainly for reasons of combating overconsumption and waste, and all the pollution that results from it. We can only regret that repair services, which provide local jobs, are too often inaccessible due, for example, to a lack of access to affordable spare parts. The Commission wants to chase waste and this is good by empowering consumers and producers in particular. Either. This idea would be commendable if the same Commission applied its own rules to itself. The best bad example being the over-ordering of vaccines at Big Pharma: 4.6 billion doses for 768 million injections in Europe. How many doses destroyed, how many doses wasted? How much will it cost European taxpayers? Who benefits from this scandal?

Mr President, Commissioners, on 10 October, three days after campaigning in Bordeaux on the campus of Emmanuel Macron’s party, you, Commissioner, vehemently launched a battle of tweets with Elon Musk, owner of X. You accused X – formerly Twitter – of doing too little against the dissemination of illegal content and disinformation. Elon Musk was therefore summoned, by letter shared in a tweet, to provide a reply within 24 hours, a deadline that is not reflected, as such, either in the DSA or in your administration’s practices. Furthermore, what kind of recommendation have you had from the European Digital Services Board to do this and feel empowered to do so? Of course, we all agree that terrorists must be prevented from using digital platforms for propaganda. Your reaction via tweet ultimately falls short of the topic, which is highly sensitive and dangerous. How can you explain that after this social media attack on E. Musk, the next morning you invited your followers to join Bluesky Social, the rival platform of former Twitter owner Jack Dorsey? Finally, for you, you would have to leave Elon Musk’s Twitter and go to Jack Dorsey’s Twitter – the one that closed the account of former President Donald Trump, because of the Digital Services Act – really? But what bothers you about E. Musk? Freedom of thought? Freedom of expression? His revelations about son Biden? His revelations about the control of information during the COVID-19 crisis? No one is fooled here, and this mix of genres is being seen, even on the Berlaymont side. According to a well-placed source in Brussels – I quote – ‘Breton is a politician who wants to stay in the press cycle for as long as possible in the run-up to the elections’. Mr Timmermans, your Dutch colleague, had the courage to resign to campaign. In a letter of 17 October, 29 civil society organisations also reacted to this misreading of the Digital Services Act and reminded you to respect the procedures laid down by law. In fact, what we see here, through your action, is not the fight against disinformation in times of conflict, but the dissemination of your political leaflet. Here, many have spoken of the truth, which is why I will quote Plato: ‘No one is more hated than the one who tells the truth.’

Mr President, Commissioner, President of the Court of Auditors, thank you for your report concerning the financial year 2022. We all see in Brussels and Paris the damage of ‘whatever it costs’. Clearly, the von der Leyen presidency will have been the mandate of the budget slide. I quote: “At the end of 2022, outstanding commitments [...] reached a record €453 billion.” The negative economic result for the financial year 2022 was €92 billion. These are astronomical amounts compared to the European Union’s budgetary expenditure, which is EUR 196 billion – with, in the end, your unfavourable opinion on the legality and regularity of budgetary expenditure. Above all, I note that the European Public Prosecutor's Office has opened only three investigations, whereas you have notified it of six cases of fraud. I also note that we have had no news in the last year of the same Public Prosecutor’s Office’s investigation into the purchase of vaccines by SMS. No search, no hearing, no witnesses. I still want to go back to the contracts for the purchase of COVID-19 vaccines: it is intolerable that we Members and you auditors should always be kept out of these contracts. Why is the Commission so lacking in transparency? What does it have to hide? Yes, you need to check the addenda to these contracts, which commit us until 2027. For how many doses are expired or discarded? How many more doses are we going to buy? How Much Does the Dose of Pfizer BioNTech Cancelled Cost? Is it a €1 billion gift? What is the status of the €80 million donated to the German company CureVac without producing doses? Because, in the end, it is the taxpayers who will pay. As Margaret Thatcher said: “There is no public money; there is only the taxpayer’s money.’

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, this morning in Strasbourg, someone in the street told me: Thank you! Thank you for not letting this scandal of secret and juicy contracts between the Commission and Pfizer, Moderna and the others pass, i.e. €71 billion for 4.6 billion doses for 445 million Europeans. But then this person asked me: Don’t you feel like Don Quixote and fighting against windmills? Is it indeed extravagant to demand full transparency from this von der Leyen Commission? Should we resurrect the 25 Knights of the Round Table to get the truth? May I remind you that Brussels signed another EUR 1 billion deal with Pfizer this summer for eight years to reserve a dose production capacity? May I remind you that it was the press that warned us of certain activities of the President’s husband, across Europe, in the Orgenesis scandal? Should we believe that his brother is the CEO of an online betting company, which is active in the insurance sector in Romania? Why was the report of the European Insurance Authority not communicated to Members on this issue? What is the Commission hiding? Official documents of European agencies must be public. The EMA’s analyses of the side effects of medicinal products must be public. All Brussels documents must be public.

Madam President, on 2 October, the fifth anti-COVID dose was also launched in France. But nobody will tell you about the fact that the Commission has just changed the authorisation of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. I quote: Given the available data on myocarditis, the current warning on this risk needs to be modified to reflect clinical evolution and outcome. More often, after the second vaccination, and more often in younger men, some cases required intensive medical care and fatal outcomes were observed. So we have a Pfizer product that Brussels admits can and has killed. However, battalions of influencers have been downplaying this side effect for two years. Why force our young soldiers to take this risk? I quote the Commission again: the duration of protection afforded by the vaccine is not established and is still under evaluation. Why does the Commission maintain this authorisation for Pfizer-BioNTech?

Madam President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, therefore, on behalf of the management of the next emergency, you want to give the Commission more power. We already support this cooperation between European governments in times of crisis and any proposal to speed up decisions in the Council. However, confiding in the Commission’s administration in times of crisis is neither realistic nor effective. During the pandemic, the European Court of Auditors noted some amateurism: no logistics experts or legal experts, and above all a lack of transparency in purchasing contracts. How can we forget the SMS scandal between Von der Leyen and the CEO of Pfizer, who won the biggest contract, with orders until 2027 for billions of euros? As long as this matter is not clarified, we cannot agree to entrust this administration with negotiating purchases for us by paying more, pre-empting the production of our companies without even knowing to whom Brussels will send the products, or intervening in the management of our borders. How do you explain that the EU pays more for Pfizer-BioNtech doses than Brazil or South Africa?

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, Madam Rapporteur, how can we talk about consumer credit, not to mention price inflation? What must have been an exception has become, over the years, a way of life, or even a way of survival. A credit to pay your bills, a credit to pay your taxes or simply to go on vacation with your children. Inflation is a tax for the poor, a bonus for the rich, as a former French president said. We must therefore protect consumers at all levels, and especially their health data, which should not be used by credit institutions to exclude or overtax them. This text is a step forward for some European countries, but we are not going far enough on credit insurance. Former patients will still have to wait years, especially after cancer or other diseases, for equal access to insurance. This European Union has created inflation. We wonder for whom, why?

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, yesterday we voted for the Pfizer report and today I am pleasantly surprised. Does the night carry advice? Because yesterday you had the opportunity to sanction, in the context of the Pfizer report, the work of the Commission which was, as we have seen, a reflection of the work of lobbyists. Indeed, that COVID-19 report did not mention either Pfizer or the SMS case, let alone the issues raised by the Court of Auditors on the lack of transparency. And you know the scandal of those juicy contracts, those contracts to which we did not have full access to protect Pfizer’s financial interests. Contracts for the purchase of hundreds of millions of doses for another four years. That is why your report is so important. Yes, we must have access to all these documents. Yes, we need to know which lobbyists are meeting with Commissioners and Members of Parliament. Pfizer has access badges. So these lobbyists meet whoever they want here. I propose that this access data for lobbyists be public. The French and Europeans need to know who is lobbying and also why. Ditto when some commissioners go to these hidden meetings held in Bilderberg. Secondly, the documents of the European Medicines Agency, which analyse the side effects of medicines and vaccines, must be accessible in all languages. Most importantly, this agency has to respond to our requests, for example by providing us with the monthly Pfizer side effects monitoring reports, as it committed to during the COVI hearings. Finally, regarding the secrecy imposed on certain documents, we should rather impose on the European administration full transparency or, at the very least, an expiry date on documents with restricted circulation. Even the CIA opens its archives. So the Commission must stop with this guilty and complicit opacity.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, let us call a cat a cat. This report is the Pfizer report. 4.6 billion doses for €71 billion, including 2.4 billion doses for Pfizer at €19.50 per dose delivered and €10 per dose cancelled. 130 pages and not a word about Pfizer or the text messages exchanged between Ms. von der Leyen and the CEO of Pfizer, while in the transparency register, it is discovered that you have contacted the lobbyists of Pfizer six times. Not a word either about Janine Small, Pfizer’s VRP, who confirmed to us that the vaccine’s efficacy on transmission had not been tested before it was placed on the market. You have also seen the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation twice. Why? Who are we kidding? According to the WHO, the pandemic is over, but the stock market reports that Pfizer has negotiated a new contract: The ability to order 325 million doses per year for eight years. Some time ago, the Spanish rapporteur asked that Pfizer not get everything and this contract was shared with Spain. On the other hand, not a word about citizen petitions. However, we believed in this parliamentary committee for transparency. But what a farce! One-way hearings. No debate. No access to Pfizer’s full contract. In camera meetings with the obligation to sign a discharge to protect Pfizer’s financial interests. The administration even asked to delete tweets. Pfizer also asked us to justify our written questions. Your report is next to the plate. Are you congratulating yourself? Want to flood Europe with vaccines? Africa, when it does not want it? Do you want to set up a European vaccination calendar? Want to educate us about vaccination? Want to put the QRcode back in place? You fight against those who disagree with you. So who does this report reflect? Of what? What job? In fact, with the lobbies, the only winner is Pfizer. So you have forgotten the European taxpayers, but I am sure they will not forget in the next elections. In any case, if necessary, you can always cross the street and have a place at Pfizer.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, this von der Leyen mandate will go down in history as an institutional hurricane. The Brussels administration swallows all the sovereign subjects: nuclear, vaccines and our mental health, the distribution of migrants to arrive near you, the delivery of weapons – with, by the way, the creation of a financial ‘Titanic’ of EUR 800 billion. And, for the digestive, Brussels imagines itself a great chamberlain of European diplomacy, with the porcelain that goes with it. So today you are here to talk about a European strategy for hostage diplomacy. But who in the world can trust you? Apart from Pfizer’s secrets, you have never been able to keep anything – as far as our vital interests are concerned. Industrial Bankruptcy, Digital Bankruptcy, Security Bankruptcy: you are importing asylum instead of leaving the fools at home. Annecy’s horror, Lola’s torture: When is all this going to end? Will you decide tomorrow that we can exchange a terrorist at home for a European at home? History has shown that it was the services of the French State, the DGSE, that went to save our French hostages by force or negotiation. Who here would die on a cold night to save our own?

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, the Left, the Greens and Macron's friends have told us: “Why do you want to remove Pfizer’s access badges from Parliament”, when Pfizer’s CEO refused to give us ten minutes to answer our questions about the biggest contract in European history. These MPs supported Pfizer. And since then, it has been the Pfizer festival. On the one hand, Pfizer defends its commercial interests: 2.4 billion doses at €19.50 per dose, business is business. And on the other side of that contract, a Commission kneeling down and saying that Pfizer is losing money. But who are we laughing at? I, like thousands of Europeans, am shocked that Pfizer is asking Covid Members to justify their questions on transparency and to leave their phones outside the room. I am shocked to have to sign a paper to protect Pfizer's financial interests, shocked that Pfizer is preventing us from expressing ourselves. And you're endorsing all of this. This wall of silence to protect Pfizer's war treasure is outrageous. This is your balance sheet. And as a reminder, we are not employees of Pfizer.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, have you seen this report by France Télévisions, where the President of the Commission and Albert Bourla of Pfizer are razing the walls in Davos and Strasbourg? And yet, today, you give the Commission a satisfecit for 2021, the year of all records: €71 billion in Big Pharma contracts. So congratulations to the Commission for ordering ten doses per person. Congratulations on hiding contracts, SMS and prices. Congratulations on buying the doses almost €20 when they cost Pfizer-BioNTech 80 cents. Congratulations on compensating Pfizer for the doses they will not produce. Congratulations on buying doses also until 2026. Congratulations on discharging Pfizer-BioNTech from the compensation for side effects. The Commission’s expertise is like Pfizer’s 95% efficiency: Who can still believe it? Let’s talk about your loan until 2058, at variable rates. How many billions lost to banks? At variable rates, what foreknowledge!

Mr President, after this debate on the purchase of military ammunition, this debate on the budget for new own resources. I note that the Commission’s €750 billion giant post-Covid recovery plan was contracted at variable rates. Who had the great idea of borrowing at a variable rate until 2058? Are they the same ones who are negotiating the canceled anti-Covid dose at 10 euros? Who calculated the slate? That is why you want new taxes for Brussels: royalties, tolls, corporate taxes, garbage taxes, compost, carbon, cryptocurrencies, the internet, and even on gender statistics. Brussels wants more money, but for what? To fatten what "big pharma"? To pay Pfizer 20 times the price of the anti-Covid dose that will then be destroyed, to pay emirs via land in Romania, for teachers and roads in Albania, for crabs in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania? And why not budget for Thionville Emergencies, teachers and roads, or for the Thionville Bridge Club, when it would be more useful, more legitimate in Thionville? Taxes of Europeans for Europeans. For Chateaubriand, after the age of superiority and privilege, your administrative empire is now experiencing the age of vanities. Yes, vanity, for you have the vanity of wanting to command elected governments. Worse, and now here are your orders or blackmails: plan labour law, plan pensions in France, suffer migrants in Italy, choose other judges, choose other journalists in Poland or Hungary, otherwise you will not have EU funds. Blackmail, therefore, and in addition with an air of untouchability. In the meantime, that is why we must not entrust you with our resources, the fruits of our sweat and our dreams.

Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, 94% is the percentage of Europeans who consider it important to protect the welfare of farm animals. Furthermore, 90% believe that a European animal welfare label would be useful to inform consumers. Finally, 72% want information on the use of a stunning method for animals when buying meat. Yet animal welfare concerns continue to be flouted on a large scale, either by imported slaughter methods and traditions or by purely economic demands in a permanent race to reduce costs. We are witnessing a real animal dumping. Faced with the ultraliberal drift and the ecological radicalism that many defend here, we propose an alternative approach. We reject insect meal as a feed for livestock and, for that matter, for humans as well. We refuse artificial or synthetic meat. We want local slaughterhouses that allow a return to localism by putting in place trade policies where animal welfare rules that apply within the European Union must apply to all imports. We want a blacklist of third countries that do not meet our standards. We refuse the slaughter without stunning and the import of this type of meat. We also support the idea of a Commissioner dedicated to this cause. Finally, give citizens a central role, introduce a mandatory EU-wide animal welfare labelling system, so that consumers can decide for themselves what they buy and what they eat.

Madam President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, this is not a qatargate, but a Bruxellesgate. Four years since Mrs von der Leyen was appointed President and you come to promise us a reform of the Commission's internal rules almost six months before the end of this term? Transparency and accountability. How can I believe you? €71 billion in Covid vaccine contracts, the largest contract in the history of the European Union. Qui cache les clauses, qui cache les SMS entre Ursula et le PDG de Pfizer, qui cache le prix des doses et jusqu'à quand? What are the activities of Mrs. von der Leyen's husband hiding? I have been waiting for your reply in writing since November. Who underestimates the side effects of covid vaccines? Who is pushing for the injection of children? Who censors Twitter? Who refuses to investigate former President Barroso's revolving doors for officials and conferences worth more than €100,000? Why does the director convicted of rape still have his office on the eighth floor? In September, I asked you what sanctions you have in place against commissioners who would not use business phones in negotiations. This morning, your administration tells me that it refuses to give business phones to its agents. So no transparency, no accountability, no sanction.