KYIV, Ukraine – After a revolution seven years ago, Ukrainians discovered that their ousted president had used public money to build a giant palace with a private zoo, a golf course and a garage full of old cars.
To prevent such corruption in the future, a number of reforms have been implemented, including the requirement that almost all government contracts be made public, so that they do not receive secret kickbacks in the pockets of high-ranking officials.
The reform, widely seen as a rare success in the country’s otherwise difficult obstacle, has covered tens of millions of dollars in annual drug procurement deals.
But in order to guarantee the supply of vaccines, Ukraine has been forced to largely abandon the rule – a measure the government says is not its choice, but the demand of the pharmaceutical giants that control the supply.
In dealing with national governments, pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson, insisted that many of the terms of the agreements are trade secrets and must be kept confidential.
Health advocacy groups vehemently criticized these deals and said that governments much better positioned than Ukraine to spend large sums on doses are very willing to accept such secrecy.
The requirement hurt the Ukrainian government and forced a state-owned procurement company created to prevent grafting into the medical system to be set aside because it was mandatory by law to disclose the terms of all contracts.
“This is due to extremely strict privacy rules and non-disclosure policies, which the purchasing company will not be able to comply with under Ukrainian law,” said Svitlana Shatalova, deputy minister of Ukrainian health, at a news conference on Thursday .
Secrecy agreements allow pharmaceutical companies to negotiate prices, delivery times and other conditions for vaccine agreements without governments or their citizens comparing agreements with those signed with other nations.
According to a document that a European official mistakenly posted on social media in December and quickly deleted, the European Union negotiated a cheaper price for the Pfizer vaccine – 12 euros, or about $ 14.60, per dose – than the United States government, which agreed to pay $ 19.50 a dose. European countries tend to pay substantially lower prices for medicines than the United States.
In Ukraine, so far, there was no indication of corruption in the vaccine agreement that it had already closed and no suggestion that money was stolen in the procurement process.
But to meet the secrecy demands of vaccine manufacturers, the government was forced to act contrary to the clean government policies that the United States and other Western countries pressured Ukraine to adopt, according to Shatalova, the deputy minister of health. .
At a meeting of the Ukrainian cabinet this month, the government excluded the state-owned purchasing company, Medical Procurement Company, from vaccine negotiations without offering a full explanation.
The Health Ministry said at the time that it would negotiate through an international nonprofit group, Crown Agents, which helps developing countries obtain medical supplies. Shatalova’s statement on Thursday was the first to link the change to vaccine manufacturers’ secrecy policies.
Medical Procurement Company director Arsen Zhumadilov was opposed to the move. In an interview, he said his organization was established “as a safeguard” against the concentration in a multi-million dollar government office of purchasing authority for the country’s predominantly socialized medical system – which for years before the revolution was a cesspool corrupt business.
Ukraine has already purchased a coronavirus vaccine from Chinese Sinovac. In that agreement, Sinovac allowed the Ukrainian government to publish some, but not all terms of the agreement. The study showed that Ukraine paid $ 18 per dose for 1.9 million doses, but did not disclose the fees paid to a Ukrainian company, Lekhim, who served as an intermediary.
Since the end of last year, the Ministry of Health has been attacked in Ukraine for failing to close a vaccine deal with a Western supplier. Russia has promoted its vaccine, Sputnik V, as an alternative, but many Ukrainians fear relying on a country with which they are at war for life-saving doses.
In any case, deliveries of vaccines manufactured in the United States will be delayed until the end of this year under the Trump government’s export ban until demand is met in the United States. Ukraine has been looking for vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson, which experts said will likely gain approval for their product from Europe’s safety regulators in the coming weeks.
Ukraine, which has reported about 1.2 million coronavirus cases and about 22,000 deaths, is expected to receive enough vaccines for about 10 percent of its population as of February or March under the Covax program, a global initiative that aims to work with manufacturers to provide equitable access to vaccines.