Covid-19: the price of vaccines in Europe unveiled in error by a Belgian minister
The price of the vaccines was revealed by the tweet of a Belgian official.
© REUTERS / Dado Ruvic
Text by: RFI Follow
3 min
Vaccination campaigns will be able to be launched in the coming days in Europe.
The conditions and the price of the purchase contracts for these vaccines are in principle confidential, but after the blunder of a Belgian government official, the general public had access to this information.
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The European Medicines Agency (EMA), then the European Commission, gave the
green light to the vaccine
from Pfizer and BioNTech.
Germany, Austria, Italy and France have indicated that they
intend to
start vaccinations against
Covid-19
from Sunday, December 27.
Eva De Bleeker's tweet was deleted after half an hour, but it angered the European Commission.
In response to criticism from the Flemish nationalist opposition, which criticized the lack of resources made available by the Belgian state for the purchase of vaccines, the Secretary of State for the Budget posted a table on her Twitter account giving details of the amounts promised by his government to manufacturers for each of the six vaccines ordered.
A cost ranging from 1.78 to 14.70 euros
In total, for Belgium, the global cost has been set at 279 million euros for 33.5 million doses.
The unit price in the European Union (EU) is also featured in this ephemeral tweet.
This shows a disparity in prices ranging from one to eight.
The cheapest, the vaccine of the Swedish-British group AstraZeneca costs 1.78 euros against 14.70 euros for that of the American Moderna.
These revelations, published at the end of last week, aroused the embarrassment of the European Commission.
She reaffirmed the importance of respecting this “
obligation
” of discretion, “
a contractual requirement
”.
This opacity, which allows pharmaceutical companies to negotiate freely with other international players, has for some time been questioned by MEPs who demand more transparency.
► See also: Covid-19: the vaccination campaign will begin on Sunday in the EU
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