Letter: request for access to documents – Advance Purchase Agreements for COVID 19 vaccines

Update 10.05.:

Honourable President von der Leyen,
Honourable Director-General Sandra Gallina,
Honourable Secretary General Ilze Juhansone,

In your replies to our Freedom of Information Request on the basis of Regulation (EC) No 1049/2001, you announced the publication of 365 documents related to the negotiations of Advanced Purchase Agreements of Covid-19 vaccines with pharmaceutical companies and the disclosure of the APAs themselves (Ares(2021)2353717). We still regret, that we only obtained this list so far and not yet access to the documents themselves. The status of our request is at this stage more than unsatisfactory. Today we would like to ask you for a status update with regard to our request and to provide a precise schedule of the planned publications of each and every document in that list.

Kind regards,
Rasmus Andresen (Greens/EFA)

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27.01.21

Honourable President von der Leyen,
Honourable President Michel,
Honourable Secretary General Ilze Juhansone,

we, the undersigned Members of European Parliament, would like to thank you for your effort in conducting negotiations with the pharma companies in order to ensure the timely and sufficient supply of the COVID-19 vaccines. The European dimension is key to ensure a fair, affordable and safe distribution of vaccines across the continent. It is a great achievement for our Union. We also would like to thank you to having published the contract with CureVac. However, we regret that the important passages of the contract are still censored, namely most of the liability chapter and price. The Commission should further negotiate with the pharmaceutical companies to disclose the relevant parts in the contracts.

Given that vaccines are being developed also thanks to the public financial support with taxpayers’ money from the EU and EU member states, it is especially important that the public interest of scientific rigor, safety and transparency is strongly preserved. We believe that transparency is key to increase trust into Commission’s actions.

With regards to current delivery problems and contracts still not being fully disclosed neither to the public nor to the European Parliament and with regards to the Ombudsman having started an inquiry regarding the lack of transparency of the COVID-19 vaccine contracts and under the right of access to documents in the EU treaties, as developed in Regulation 1049/2001, we would like to ask you to immediately grant access to the other contracts with disclosure of full information.

Additionally, we would like to ask you to provide us with further negotiation documents, especially:

– all reports (and other notes) from meetings of the Vaccines Procurement Steering Committee and the Joint Negotiation Team (JNT) with representatives of pharmaceutical companies about Advance Purchase Agreements (APAs) and the purchase of potential vaccines against COVID-19;

– all correspondence (including emails and their attachments) between the Vaccines Procurement Steering Committee and the Joint Negotiation Team (JNT) and representatives of pharmaceutical companies (including Sanofi-GSK, Johnson & Johnson, CureVac, AstraZeneca, Moderna and others) about Advance Purchase Agreements (APAs) and the purchase of potential vaccines against COVID-19;

– a list of all the above-mentioned documents (including dates, names of participants/senders/recipients and their affiliation, subject of meeting/correspondence).

We would like to thank the Commission and the Council in advance for their cooperation and the disclosure of all relevant documents from the negotiations regarding the vaccine contracts.

Kind regards,

Rasmus Andresen (Greens/EFA)
David Cormand (Greens/EFA)
Dimitrios Papadimoulis (GUE/NGL)
Pierre Larrouturou (S&D)
Kim van Sparrentak (Greens/EFA)
Michèle Rivasi (Greens/EFA)
Tilly Metz (Greens/EFA)
Margarete Auken (Greens/EFA)
Jutta Paulus (Greens/EFA)