EU queen Ursula preached transparency – then did backdoor deals with Big Pharma
Well, this is awkward. How many times has Ursula von der Leyen, European Commission president and unelected de facto ruler of the EU, delivered sermons about transparency like she's the high priestess of some kind of parallel Brussels Vatican? And now the EU's own top court has called her out in a ruling for neglecting to practice what she preaches.
Back in 2023, during her State of the European Union address, doing her finest impression of someone elected by the actual public, von der Leyen declared the need to douse any and all sketchiness in sunlight in order to 'not allow any autocracy's Trojan horses to attack our democracies from within.'
'Transparency should characterize the work of all the members of the Commission and of their cabinets,' she said as far back as 2019. 'I have asked commissioners…to engage more and be more transparent,' she proclaimed in a speech to EU parliamentarians last year. Transparency and accountability also figured prominently in her bid for reappointment by the EU's ruling elites last year.
Great news! She can now finally embark on this noble mission, and begin her journey with little more than a simple glance in the mirror. Because the European Court of Justice – the body that rules on whether EU institutions have actually crossed into illegality, not just occupying their usual territory of elite-grade idiocy – has just decided that Queen Ursula's Commission can't just wave away a pile of her own Covid-era text messages by going, 'Whoops! They disappeared. Oh well, what do you do?' Which is basically what the Commission's response was to the New York Times when it asked to see those messages.
And how did the Times know that these texts even existed? Because Ursula literally told them, bragging in an interview about how she scored so many vaxxes because she's super tight with Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla. All this was for a piece spotlighting her Covid efforts, published in April 2021: 'How Europe sealed a Pfizer vaccine deal with texts and calls.'
The article featured the same kind of glamour photography reminiscent of the good ol' days when Ursula was Germany's defense minister from 2013 to 2019, under former Chancellor Angela Merkel, and doing photo shoots in front of military hardware while accusations swirled that she had bungled the budget with shady defense contracts, even as the Bundeswehr was stuck using brooms for guns during a NATO exercise, as the Atlantic Council reported in 2015.
'For a month, Ms von der Leyen had been exchanging texts and calls with Bourla, the chief executive of Pfizer… Pfizer might have more doses it could offer the bloc – many more,' the NYT piece reads, referring to the 'personal diplomacy' that 'played a big role in a deal' for 1.8 billion Pfizer anti-Covid doses.
So the Times hears about these text messages and was like, 'Oh, cool. Let's see!'
Suddenly Queen Ursula became a lot less chatty. So the Times took the matter to the EU's own top court to get the disclosure. And now this court has said, in legal terms, that Ursula can't just ghost the Times – and the public by extension – without giving a real reason. That there has to be a 'plausible explanation to justify the non possession' of the texts. And also, the court says that 'the Commission has failed to explain in a plausible manner' why it thought that these messages were so trivial that they could be vaporized like they were just her Eurovision contest text voting and not a matter of public record which, by definition, should be maintained.
Out of these little chats came €71 billion in Covid jab contracts with Big Pharma's Pfizer and AstraZeneca – 11 of them to be precise, totaling 4.6 billion doses, paid for with cash taken straight from EU taxpayers. Enough for ten doses for every EU citizen.
Turns out that freewheeling it may have resulted in some consequences that could have been avoided had a diverse group of minds been engaged on the issue, as protocol normally dictates, and not just Ursula's. It's not like there hasn't been a costly fallout from all this. A big chunk of the EU, including Germany, Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, Lithuania, Estonia, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic, is shouting about surplus doses for which they're on the hook, urging Brussels to renegotiate the contractual terms with Big Pharma. Germany alone has reportedly trashed 200 million of them. Tricky to negotiate, though, when no one's even sure what the terms were, as the second-highest European court pointed out last year. 'The Commission did not give the public sufficiently wide access to the purchase agreements for COVID-19 vaccines… The Commission did not demonstrate that wider access to those clauses would actually undermine the commercial interests of those undertakings,' it ruled.
The details of these contracts – how they were made, what they say, and how anyone's supposed to back out of them if citizens politely decline to max out their ten-jab punch card – remain a mystery.
Back in 2024, Brussels more or less shrugged and suggested that it could really only be as transparent as the courts forced it to be. So hey, what can you do? 'In general, the Commission grants the widest possible public access to documents, in line with the principles of openness and transparency,' the EU said, underscoring that the lower court ruling 'confirmed that the Commission was entitled to provide only partial access.'
Well, good news, guys! Your very own top court just ruled that you can now be a lot more transparent! So go crazy. Be the change that you keep saying you want to be in the world. Nothing is holding you back now. If transparency were a vaccine, this court just gave Ursula a booster. So we'll see if it takes. I won't hold my breath.
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