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Bilateral agreements between the Ministry of Health and various vaccine manufacturers accuse the federal government of having acted in a lack of solidarity and possibly also of violating EU law. Health Minister Jens Spahn (CDU) claims that he has obtained 30 million doses of vaccines from Biontech, 20 million from Curevac and five million from IDT Biologika, outside of the joint purchase of vaccines from the EU.
It is true that the ampoules should only be delivered after the EU orders. Preliminary contracts with Biontech and Curevac are causing a stir in Brussels. As the Ministry of Health confirmed to SPIEGEL, they occurred on September 8 and August 31, at a time when negotiations between the EU Commission and the manufacturers were still ongoing.
However, like all other EU countries, the federal government had contractually agreed not to conduct its own order negotiations with vaccine producers with whom the EU also speaks. According to the agreement, the start of negotiations is not allowed. The president of the EU Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, confirmed this personally on Friday: “We have all made a legally binding commitment that there will be no parallel negotiations.”
Suspicion of breaking the law
This was intended to prevent the EU’s negotiating position, which agreed on a common vaccine strategy in June, from weakening vis-à-vis manufacturers. “But that’s exactly what the Health Ministry did,” says Göttingen’s European lawyer Alexander Thiele. “It appears that the federal government has violated the agreement with the Commission.” The fact that the preliminary contracts are mere declarations of intent does not change anything.
The Ministry of Health defends its approach. “The bilateral agreement does not affect the EU’s contract with Biontech, nor does it delay delivery of the vaccine to member states,” said Ministry spokesman Hanno Kautz. The question of a possible violation of the law remains open.
Legal issues aside, one-handed vaccination attempts in the rest of the EU threaten to create the impression that Germany is acting selfishly. The preliminary contracts with Biontech and Curevac “clearly violate the spirit of the agreement between the EU countries,” French MEP Pascal Canfin told SPIEGEL. “We have agreed in the EU to order the vaccines together and distribute them fairly,” said Canfin, who is considered a confidant of French President Emmanuel Macron. “If a country orders for itself, that’s bad. It’s even worse if it’s one of the big countries. “
The EU Commission stays out
Others, however, apparently want to forget about the process as quickly as possible. The Portuguese Minister of Health Marta Temido, for example, whose country assumed the presidency of the Council of the EU at the end of the year, was interrogated on several occasions by journalists about a possible violation of the law by the Germans, and avoided giving a clear answer.
The EU Commission does not seem to want to go into more details. Already on Wednesday there were partly surreal scenes in a virtual press conference. Journalists kept asking what the Biontech Berlin deal was all about. Apparently word hadn’t gotten around that there was also a preliminary contract with Curevac. More than half a dozen times, Commission spokesman Eric Mamer and his colleagues emphasized that the 30 million doses of vaccines for Germans were part of the 100 million that the Commission had recently ordered from Biontech / Pfizer, although the spokesman for the German ministry Kautz said publicly that on Monday He had claimed otherwise.
But Mamer did not even want to know about the existence of the preliminary contracts: “We cannot tell you if there is a letter of intent between the German authorities and Biontech / Pfizer on a desk somewhere in Germany.”
