Mandiner based on the POLITICO article .

According to POLITICO, the European Parliament's COVI, i.e. Special Committee on Covid-19, will come to an inglorious end. The EP will probably vote on the report of the panel investigating joint EU vaccine procurement in the middle of summer – the road to that point, however, seems very bumpy.

The paper reminds us: the European Ombudsman already condemned the European Commission in March 2022

because they refused to search the text messages of Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla.

That is why the European Parliament intervened and formed a special investigation committee headed by the Belgian Social Democratic representative Kathleen Van Brempt, who had already proven herself in the diesel scandal.

The investigation was sabotaged

However , "16 months later, we know nothing more about the cryptic messages, and what little we do know about the vaccine deal comes from press leaks," according to POLITICO.

POLITICO summarizes the performance of the investigation committee in that in May of this year, a small group of members of the European Parliament managed to meet with the head of the European Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority (HERA), Pierre Delsaux, who informed them that the European Commission had successfully achieved reducing the quantities to be delivered at Pfizer. "Participants were not allowed to take notes or bring their phones into the meeting room", and the fact of the meeting "was also kept a secret from the other members of the COVI committee". So not only the public,

but even the European Parliament as a whole, or even the COVI investigation committee as a whole, could not be informed of the facts in the vaccine case.

According to POLITICO's information, the COVI committee invited either Bourla or Von der Leyen for questioning in the matter in vain: Bourla said no twice, and Von der Leyen was saved by the EP and allowed to meet privately with the parliamentary leaders instead of being questioned by the committee. COVI also tried to ask Pfizer for the vaccine procurement contracts, but the American company simply said no to them.

The People's Party is flying

The newspaper writes that all factions present in COVI fought for the publicity of the vaccine procurement contract - except for the European People's Party, Von der Leyen's mother party, which "tried to make the matter insignificant".

As of now, no MEP has seen the entire contract itself,

and the small group that received any information at all about the content of the new contract had to give a "solemn declaration" that "no information about the negotiation will be shared". In EP practice, this type of declaration is only used in the committee dealing with international trade, but even there only rarely.

At the same time, under the influence of the European People's Party, "references to transparency were watered down in the commission's final report, perhaps driven by the need not to give more ammunition to extreme right-wing groups that take the vaccine issue hard."

Photo: AFP/Pool/John Thys