(Bloomberg) -- The European Commission refused to hand over text messages its president sent to Pfizer Inc.’s boss at the height of the pandemic, posing a transparency challenge over a major vaccine deal.
The New York Times asked the EU’s General Court on Friday to force the disclosure of a message exchange between Ursula von der Leyen and chief executive officer, Albert Bourla, that could show how a multi billion euro vaccine deal was struck in 2021.
However, lawyers for the Brussels-based executive said that while they “could not deny” that text messages were exchanged between von der Leyen and Bourla — as nations rushed to secure enough vaccines for their populations — they never kept hold of any records of them as they were not considered important.
“It would be materially close to impossible and undesirable from a public interest perspective to record all the communication which do not have substantial and stable content and are of an ephemeral nature,” Paolo Stancanelli, a lawyer for the executive, said in a EU court Friday.
In 2020, as the pandemic’s death toll rose and successive lockdowns wrought havoc through Europe’s economy, von der Leyen sought to secure more vaccines for EU governments. Its roll out of the shots initially lagged behind the US and other regions that were faster to get and distribute vaccines.
She announced a new contract in May 2021 for Pfizer to supply as many as 1.8 billion shots between 2021 and 2023, and a New York Times article claimed that the deal was negotiated over text.
Regulators previously said there was no record of the text messages, before European ombudsman Emily O’Reilly pressed the commission to search again for the relevant exchanges and weigh whether they should be disclosed.
The EU institution’s ultimate failure to release the texts “raises significant concerns that its policies are evading and undermining the commission’s transparency obligations,” Bondine Kloostra, a lawyer for the New York Times, said in the Luxembourg court.
“Transparency and public access to government documents play a vital role in democratic oversight,” she said. The New York Times had previously tried to obtain the messages through a freedom of information request, but that was refused.
The EU’s General Court will deliver its ruling in the case in the coming months. That decision can be appealed to the bloc’s highest court, the European Court of Justice.
Pfizer declined to comment on the case.
The case is: T-36/23 Stevi and The New York Times v Commission.
--With assistance from Ashleigh Furlong.
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