BRUSSELS – In Europe, hungry for vaccines and rich in money, the search for more doses has nations negotiating with each other, weighing purchases from Russia and China and receiving offers from intermediaries ranging from real fraud to frank.
Amid growing anger over the slow launch of the coronavirus vaccine in the European Union that has left them far behind in several other wealthy countries, many EU states are looking beyond the bloc’s joint purchasing strategy, which now looks woefully discouraging .
A huge black market – or at least gray – has emerged, with pitches from around the world at prices often exorbitant. Vendors approached EU governments claiming to offer 460 million doses of vaccines, according to the first results of an investigation by the bloc’s anti-fraud agency, shared with The New York Times.
Although they are still planning to obtain vaccines from the bloc, some countries are also trying to negotiate directly with drug manufacturers and eyeing the murky open market, where they are still unsure of sellers and products. Some also agreed to exchange vaccines with each other, businesses some of which now have reason to regret.
Last year, the European Union took a long time to make massive advance purchases from pharmaceutical companies, acting weeks after the United States, Britain and a handful of other countries. This year, the bloc was taken by surprise by the slower than expected vaccine production, and some countries fumbled with implementation.
About 5 percent of the nearly 450 million people in the EU received at least one dose of a vaccine, compared with nearly 14 percent in the United States, 27 percent in Britain and 53 percent in Israel earlier this week, according to Our World in Database of data and governments.
The stumbling blocks of the richest nation bloc in the world have made vaccine policy toxic. Particularly irritating to many Europeans is the sight of a former EU member, Britain, moving forward with its vaccination and reopening plans, while EU societies remain blocked amid a new wave of dangerous variants, their economies plunging more and more in the recession.
In the last months of 2020, several countries have chosen to give up part of their population shares of vaccines purchased in the EU. Much of that trade involved less wealthy countries, with less infrastructure and hard-to-reach populations, selling their Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccine stocks that require ultracold storage and instead making the cheaper AstraZeneca vaccine, which is easier to handle, the centerpiece of your vaccination campaigns.
But then AstraZeneca, whose vaccine was developed with the University of Oxford, reduced its expected deliveries to the EU due to production problems. And despite the experts’ assurances, many Europeans expressed doubts about this after some leaders questioned its effectiveness in older age groups, which were not well represented in clinical trials (Pfizer also suffered a cut in supply)
Any country’s decision to drop doses is a potential political dynamite, and recriminations have already begun. Poland gave up a portion of its expensive share of Moderna expected later this year, reasoning that it would not arrive soon enough to make much of a difference, considering that they were anticipating broad deliveries from AstraZeneca and potentially the Johnson & Johnson vaccine at that point.
“I would never give up on buying what is safe and efficient,” said Andrzej Halicki, a Polish member of the European Parliament. “As a former minister, I can say that, in my opinion, this is a criminal action, it is a breach of obligations.”
A German official said the country had secured 50 million doses of the Modern vaccine, a number significantly higher than would be obtained with the population distribution of the EU supply. EU officials have confirmed that Germany has obtained at least some of its extra doses from other member states.
Germany also secured a controversial side deal with Pfizer-BioNTech, for 30 million extra doses to be delivered in late 2021, generating anger in parts of the EU, as the move was seen as the wealthiest EU nation taking the block to a collective strategy and then hedge, going it alone.
The bloc’s fear is that such parallel agreements could undermine its collective purchasing power and nullify delivery times for all 27 countries.
The European Commission has made it clear that EU countries should not enter into separate agreements with the same pharmaceutical companies with which they have negotiated contracts for the entire bloc.
The Netherlands guaranteed 600,000 doses of the injection that Pfizer developed with the German company BioNTech from one or more other EU countries, according to a government official who did not say which nation or nations abandoned them.
France has not made public any agreement it has made, but Prime Minister Jean Castex said: “If doses of the vaccine are available, the instruction is clear: France will buy immediately.”
Hungary unilaterally approved and purchased Russian and Chinese vaccines, and others, such as Croatia and the Czech Republic, are evaluating similar measures. EU officials say they are receiving calls from several other member states, eager to see the bloc approve the Russian shot, Sputnik V.
In a worrying turn, senior government officials and even heads of government received dozens of unsolicited offers of vaccines. Few of the sellers appear to be legitimate operators, said Ville Itala, director general of the European Anti-Fraud Office, known as OLAF.
“They are offering vaccines, huge quantities, so far it is 460 million doses, which is about 3 billion euros,” he said in an interview this week. “So it is not a small business, it is a big business and it is growing all the time.”
Itala said he was taking the unusual step of making the information public, just over a week after his agency’s investigation began, because the potential risks for Europeans are enormous.
Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, said last week: “I think that in a crisis like this you will always have people who seek to benefit or profit from the problems of others and we see an increasing number of fraud and attempted fraud. “
But with offers piling up, officials say they are prepared to examine each one carefully before rejecting it.
“Wherever a few thousand or a few hundred thousand vaccines appear to be about to fall from a truck, a Hungarian scout should be ready to catch them,” said Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban earlier this month.
In neighboring Czech Republic, Prime Minister Andrej Babis said he received offers from brokers in Dubai and elsewhere, while those proposals also reached the inboxes of senior government officials in Germany, Greece and Finland, to name just a few.
Most intermediaries claim to be selling the AstraZeneca injection, Itala said. The company said it only negotiates with governments or multilateral organizations, such as through the Covax vaccine sharing initiative. But that does not exclude the possibility for countries to discreetly resell them to third parties.
“AstraZeneca has not authorized any shipment of the vaccine outside the existing contract with the European Union,” said a company spokesman. “There should be no supply from the private sector for sale or distribution of the vaccine in Europe.”
While many of the offers are clearly fraudulent, others may be legitimate, officials say, even if the prices quoted are astronomical.
In Italy, many of the camps have gone to regional authorities who have extensive power over health systems. Italian police and other authorities are actively examining the camps.
“If these doses are acquired legally and there is a completely regular process, we can also consider the purchase,” said Cesare Buquicchio, spokesman for the country’s minister of health. “Because of delays in deliveries, we were able to rethink this, nothing is immutable, we could re-discuss this at the European level.”
In the northern region of Emilia-Romagna, Raffaele Donini, the chief health officer, said he had received several emails offering millions of vaccines, including one from J&G General Service DOO, a company based in Croatia that offered doses of AstraZeneca to one not very high price higher than that negotiated by the EU.
The company’s director, Juri Gasparotti, said that a “large pharmaceutical company” outside the EU, which he declined to name, was in direct contact with AstraZeneca and would supply the batch.
Gasparotti said vaccine producers were “hypocritical” in saying that they sell only to state entities.
Other vaccines offered to Emilia-Romagna by Mondial Pharma, a company based in the Swiss city of Lugano, cost more than those offered by Mr. Gasparotti.
Pierfrancesco Lucignano, marketing officer at Mondial Pharma, said the company offered the region three million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, which he said was produced by the Serum Institute of India, AstraZeneca’s official Indian manufacturing partner, for about 26 euros per dose, almost $ 32.
“There are other countries outside Europe that are buying,” he said, adding that he is in negotiations with countries in South America and Africa.
The Veneto region, in northern Italy, has also received offers from millions of doses, from intermediaries with whom it has done business in the past. “We are not talking about rascals who come here and pretend to have a garage full of vaccines,” said the president of the region, Luca Zaia, at a news conference earlier this month.
Donini, the Emilia-Romagna official, said his region had suspended negotiations and suggested that the Italian state make the most of the region’s connection with brokers.
“We activated a setting that would allow us to walk 100 kilometers an hour,” he said, “and we are forced to walk 20 kilometers an hour because we have no gas, although we know that there are people who could supply us. “
Emma Bubola contributed reporting from Rome, Constant Méheut from Paris, Monika Pronczuk from Brussels, Thomas Erdbrink Amsterdam, and Melissa Eddy from Berlin.