A conservative, anti-globalist MEP has demanded that European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen immediately resign from her post in light of the investigation launched last week by the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EEPO) into her shadowy purchase of 4.5 billion doses of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccines—vaccines whose efficacy of preventing the transmission of the virus had not been tested before entering the market.
During a fiery address delivered at the European Parliament on Tuesday, Romanian MEP Cristian Terhes (ECR) demanded the European Commission chief “immediately and unconditionally” resign from her position since “her actions are currently [being] criminally investigated by the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EEPO).”
Citing a report released a few days ago by the European Court of Auditors which said: “The Commission has signed, up to November 2021, €71 billion worth of contracts on behalf of member states to purchase up to 4.6 billion Covid-19 vaccine doses,” the Romanian MEP highlighted that, in doing so, von der Leyen had “purchased 10 doses of vaccines for every EU citizen based on contracts that were never released to the public.”
Continuing, as he held up two near-completely redacted pages of the procurement contract between the European Commission and BioNTech-Pfizer, MEP Terhes said: “This is how the contracts that she signed with pharmaceutical companies were released to the public.”
“How is it possible in the European Union that is called being transparent with the way it is using people’s money?” Terhes asked.
The MEPs statements come just days after Croatian MEP Mislav Kolakušić, in a video message posted to Twitter, suggested that the “purchase of 4.5 billion vaccine doses for 450 million EU citizens is the biggest corruption scandal in human history.”
Croatian MEP Mislav Kolakušić, during statements delivered on the floor of the European Parliament on Wednesday, called on the EU to “immediately terminate the contract on the procurement of vaccines against COVID-19” given that the “contract is currently under criminal investigation by the EEPO.”
Like Terhes, he too held up pages of the procurement contract between the European Commission and the vaccine manufacturer, both of which were almost entirely redacted.
“These are not unimportant pages,” Kolakušić continued. “These pages refer to the quality of the vaccine, the prices, the manufacturer’s responsibility for damages caused by the use of the vaccine, and the recall of the vaccine. We must terminate the harmful contract immediately.
As The European Conservative reported at the time:
Months later, after a request for access to the text messages had been submitted—and was subsequently denied by the European Commission—European Union Ombudsman Emily O’Reilly looked into the matter more deeply, and later concluded that von der Leyen’s refusal to disclose the incriminating text messages constituted a clear cut “case of maladministration.”
Ursula von der Leyen’s behavior “does not meet the expectations of transparency and administrative standards within the Commission,” O’Reilly said, adding that the text messages “fall within the framework of European legislation on public access to documents” and “the public can have access to them if they concern the work of the institution.”
Others, at the time, also criticized the Commission’s unprecedented lack of transparency. Hans van Scharen, the spokesman for The Corporate Europe Observatory, a watchdog group that scrutinizes the relationships between European politicians and lobbies slammed von der Leyen’s refusal to disclose the text messages to the public, saying in 25 years the European Commission has “never reached such a level of opacity as we are currently seeing with the pharmaceutical companies.”
