Belgian court orders Poland to pay Pfizer €1.3bn for Covid vaccines

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A Belgian court has ordered Poland to pay US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer around €1.3 billion (5.6 billion zloty) for COVID-19 vaccines ordered by the European Commission on behalf of member states during the pandemic but which the Polish government later refused to receive.

Poland’s health ministry notes that the ruling can still be appealed, and had indicated that it will “pursue all legal means available to change this decision and defend its interests”. Prime Minister Donald Tusk, meanwhile, has blamed the former government for the issue.

The case dates back to the height of the pandemic, when the European Commission, in 2021, ordered billions of doses of vaccines, including from Pfizer, on behalf of member states, which were meant to pay for them.

Soon after, Poland began receiving its share of the shots but, in April 2022, the Polish government, then led by the Law and Justice (PiS) party, invoked a special contractual clause and announced that it would no longer receive or pay for around 60 million doses that remained.

Poland, which by then had already sold or donated some of its surplus vaccines, argued that its cases of Covid infections had dropped, while the mass influx of Ukrainian refugees after Russia’s full-scle invasion in February 2022 had strained its public finances.

Romania later made a similar decision to not comply with the contract. In 2023, Pfizer sued both countries in Belgium, the country where the contracts were signed. Over the course of the case, Poland also argued that Pfizer had potentially abused its market position.

The court on Wednesday rejected those arguments. It found that neither the drop in infections nor the war in Ukraine justified a decision to annul or modify the contract, reports medical news service Rynek Zdrowia. The court added that Poland had failed to prove that Pfizer abused its market position.

It ordered Poland to accept the remaining vaccine deliveries and pay Pfizer around €1.3 billion and for Romania to also receive its shots and pay the pharmaceutical giant €600 million.

Pfizer welcomed the decision and said that it expects Poland and Romania to comply with it. “This decision reflects the importance of the contractual obligations that underpinned a successful European pandemic response,” it said in a statement.

The Polish health ministry acknowledged the ruling but noted that Poland has the right to appeal. It said that the ministry would first conduct “detailed legal analysis” of the decision and consult with other government departments before deciding on further steps.

“Poland intends to use all legal means available to it to change this ruling and defend its interests,” added the ministry.

Meanwhile, in a social media post, Tusk, whose government came to power in December 2023, blamed the former PiS administration, which he said had “ordered COVID vaccines that it did not collect and did not pay for”.

“Poland, and thus all of us, will have to pay over six billion [zloty] in fines for PiS’s extreme stupidity,” wrote Tusk.

In response, Morawiecki accused Tusk of “Himalayan [levels of] hypocrisy”, posting an extract from a 2021 interview in which Tusk expressed support for the European Commission’s purchase of the vaccines.

Janusz Cieszyński, a former PiS deputy health minister minister, added that the decision to buy the vaccines was made by EU Commission head Ursula von der Leyen. He noted that member states could either purchase all the doses or “be left with nothing”.

While Poland’s initial rollout of Covid vaccines went very well, takeup soon slowed, with polls showing a relatively high level of scepticism towards the vaccines in Polish society.

For much of 2020 and 2021, Poland had among the EU’s highest Covid death rates, with unvaccinated people making up a large proportion of fatalities.

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Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Main image credit: U.S. Secretary of Defense / Public domain / Wikimedia Commons (under CC BY 2.0)

Olivier Sorgho

Olivier Sorgho is senior editor at Notes from Poland, covering politics, business and society. He previously worked for Reuters.