Pfizer, the Covid-19 pharmaceutical manufacturing titan, has sued the government of Poland for non-compliance over their Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine procurement contract.
The drug company has alleged that Poland breached their COVID-19 contract and is now demanding nearly $1.5 billion.
The litigation stems from nearly 60 million covid shots that Poland neither collected nor compensated Pfizer for under their contract.
Pfizer is known for some draconian contractual demands during their covid-19 procurement negotiations with some countries and have played hardball in some foreign courts and among international political circles.
In Australia, where parliament members have demanded to see the Pfizer contract with the Australian government, Pfizer has refused.
In Uruguay, when Pfizer found itself in court over the mandated Covid-19 shots for children, the presiding judge demanded to see the Pfizer contract with the Uruguay government within 48 hours. Both the Uruguay president's office and Pfizer lawyers proffered to the judge that even the court could not view it because the contract was "confidential."
In some countries, like Rwanda and Israel, Pfizer included manufacturing plants into the procurement contracts.
In some contracts, Pfizer wanted no liability like in the U.S. for the mRNA shots, and demanded some collateral interest. In some, the pharmaceutical companies demanded that no national legislation would be created making the pharmaceutical companies liable from any injuries.
To date, in the U.S., the FDA, CDC, NIH, and NIAID have not officially recognized the vascular and neurological injuries stemming from covid shots.
CDM has been reporting these injuries as well as the cardio injuries since 2021 directly from those who received their shots during the early 2021 roll-out.
Pfizer and the U.S. FDA even did not want the public to read the Pfizer documents submitted to the FDA for 75 years. That legal argument was nuked by a U.S. court and Pfizer was ordered to turn over its documents publicly as a result of a Freedom of Information case.
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki has cited ‘force majeure,’ as Poland's not being able to fulfill its contractual obligations, and specifically mentioned the war between Russia and Ukraine as the reason.
The Polish government and Pfizer failed to re-negotiate their terms after a year long attempt and hence, this current lawsuit.
Morawiecki, like many European leaders, has stated that Poland has incurred extraordinary expenditures because of the armed conflict between Russia and Ukraine and the refugee migration. Under European Union mandates, host countries to refugees incur financial responsibility of the refugees.
The Pfizer lawsuit was filed in Brussels. It was the EU Commissioner who negotiated with the CEO of Pfizer for the nations within the European Commission.
The next court hearing is December 6.
The lawsuit “does not concern Poland only,” said the Polish Minister of Health Katarzyna Sojka. Other European Union nations face a similar predicament with Pfizer.
Poland sent a public letter to Pfizer's shareholders in May 2023 and called upon Pfizer to renegotiate its COVID-19 vaccines contract with the EU.
The letter was signed by Poland's then Minister of Health Adam Niedzielski.
"Despite the stablised epidemic situation in European Union countries, Pfizer is still planning to deliver hundreds of millions of vaccines to Europe," Niedzielski wrote. "This is utterly pointless from the public health point of view, as most of them will be destroyed due to the limited shelf life and limited demand."
Poland Minister of Health Niedzielski's appeal to the shareholders was based upon Pfizer's "Corporate Social Responsibility" and asked the company to move to more favorable terms in their negotiations and lower the total amount of doses it was sending to the EU, and to spread them out over a longer period of time.
Poland had been leading the efforts to re-negotiate the EU's largest contract for 1.1 billion doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine.
The deal had been signed at the height of the pandemic and locked in the EU into buying nearly half a billion doses even though vaccination percentages eventually dropped and more information surfaced about the origin of covid, other options for early treatments, the neurological and vascular injuries from the mRNA shots, and the draconian requirements in the pharmaceutical contracts.
A report from German public broadcaster BRS24 in January 2023 put the number at 36.6 million doses unused in German warehouses, while Austria’s health minister had said previously that 17.5 million doses were unused in the country and “available for vaccination.”
The negotiation discussions had addressed cancelling European Commission doses with a higher price per dose for the remaining deliveries, which is called "cancellation fee" in the industry.
"Instead of showing solidarity, the company still wants to make money from funds allocated by EU Member States solely for the protection of public health," read Niedzielski's letter.
Pfizer's largest shareholders include SSgA Funds Management, Vanguard Group and Wellington Management.
This matter may now fall to the new Polish government, likely to be headed by Donald Tusk, who also served as President of the European Council from 2014 to 2019.
The case’s outcome could have significant implications for international vaccine contracts and the invocation of 'force majeure' in such agreements and possible subsequent disagreements if and when they arise between governments and pharmaceutical companies over covid procurement contracts.
In some of these pharmaceutical covid contracts, foreign governments ordered a boatload of shots and were locked into the price and number and the pharmaceutical companies wanted the edge to decide when the doses were going to be delivered and even more so, the contractual edge to change the delivery date and have the governments agree to pay and accept the orders even if a cure for covid was discovered.
The devil will be in the details of the contracts and also whether or not, Pfizer fully disclosed everything to the governments. Up until now, Pfizer has been wanting to keep more sealed and confidential until the courts have to force them to be transparent.
This is a developing story.
