The European Commission has officially acknowledged that COVID-19 vaccines were authorized and distributed without having all the necessary safety data and without complying with the health control procedures commonly applied to medicines in the European Union.
The admission, made in a formal response to parliamentary questions, confirms that a “conditional” authorization was chosen to accelerate the vaccination campaign during the height of the pandemic, despite the authorities’ knowledge that the information available was incomplete.
According to the Commission’s statement, the so-called “conditional authorization” was used to allow access to products in an emergency situation, “when a complete data file is not yet available.” Brussels insists it was an exceptional measure, accompanied by periodic reviews and subsequent checks. However, in the contracts signed in November 2020 with Pfizer-BioNTech, it was already explicitly acknowledged that the long-term effects, the efficacy of the doses, and the possible appearance of unidentified side effects were unknown.
Austrian MEP Gerald Hauser (Patriots for Europe/FPÖ), one of the most outspoken critics of the health management, recalled that the Commission never warned citizens of these limitations: “Europeans were deliberately kept in the dark that the effectiveness and safety of the vaccines were not guaranteed,” he stated. In his view, millions of people effectively became “test subjects” under a cloak of political urgency.
The Commission’s admission inevitably revives the scandal known as PfizerGate, which erupted over Commission president Ursula von der Leyen over her private text exchanges with Pfizer’s CEO, Albert Bourla, in the weeks leading up to the signing of the contracts. Those messages, never published despite repeated requests from the European Parliament and the EU Ombudsman, continue to fuel suspicions of opacity in the negotiations and a possible conflict of interest.
The fact that Brussels now admits that the vaccines were approved without the usual safety standards adds a politically significant element: it confirms that the Commission concealed essential information at the very moment when citizens were being asked for an act of mass trust. The promised transparency never materialized, while the pharmaceutical companies were legally shielded from any responsibility for adverse effects.
Three years after the start of the vaccination campaign, the debate has returned to the forefront in a political climate marked by the erosion of von der Leyen’s credibility, which has already faced several motions of censure in the European Parliament. PfizerGate thus becomes a symbol of the pandemic’s mismanagement and how European institutions prioritized political urgency over health safeguards and truthful information for the population.
