Pfizer has emerged victorious in a legal brawl with Poland and Romania over contested COVID vaccine orders, with a Belgian court ordering the two countries to pay €1.9 billion ($2.2 billion).
The Court of First Instance in Brussels on Wednesday ruled that Poland must shell out some €1.3 billion ($1.5 billion) to the New York-based drugmaker, while Romania is responsible for about €600 million ($691 million), according to reports.
Poland is not taking the order sitting down and intends to use “all legal remedies available to it to reverse this ruling and defend its interests,” the country’s Ministry of Health announced in an April 1 release.
The country has the right to appeal the judgment in a new procedure that would allow existing and new “legal and factual arguments,” the health ministry said, noting that further actions will be taken after an in-depth analysis of the judgment and discussions with legal representatives.
Pfizer, meanwhile, says that the court's decision "reflects the importance of the contractual obligations that underpinned a successful European pandemic response, which was built on the principle of solidarity between Member States," a spokesperson told Fierce Pharma in an emailed statement.
The company has been chasing multiple European countries to honor their original 2021 COVID vaccine order contracts, bringing a lawsuit against Poland and Romania in 2023 alleging a “prolonged contractual breach” after the countries failed to pay for millions of doses of Pfizer and BioNTech’s Comirnaty vaccine.
The vaccine order debacle stems back to a massive COVID supply deal from the European Commission in May 2021, covering 900 million vaccine doses for delivery split between 2022 and 2023. European officials exercised an option for more doses in December of 2021, signing on to receive another 200 million doses slated for delivery in 2022. The agreement was later investigated by Europe’s Court of Auditors based on the nature of the negotiations and concerns over text messages between European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Pfizer’s CEO, Albert Bourla, in the lead-up to the deal.
As COVID cases began to slow across the globe, a group of European countries—including Poland—expressed “deep concern” over the hefty amount of vaccines ordered. In 2023, the countries sought a “new, fairer deal” to amend the surplus of vaccine doses that had previously been ordered, Euractiv reported at the time.
Meanwhile, Poland had already taken a stand against the vaccine order in 2022, with former Minister of Health Adam Niedzielski invoking a force majeure clause in the contract and refusing to pay for or accept further doses based on the country’s financial peril amid an influx of Ukrainian refugees fleeing from Russia’s invasion.
Ultimately, the Brussels court order rejected Poland and Romania’s arguments against the vaccine order, determining that a drop in country-wide COVID infections and the Ukraine war’s impacts on Poland did not justify contract annulment, Bloomberg reported. The court also found that the countries failed to prove that Pfizer had abused a dominant market position.
Along with the monetary payments, the countries were ordered to receive the COVID shot deliveries.
Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk pointed a finger at his predecessor Mateusz Jakub Morawiecki, writing in an X post that because “Morawiecki's government ordered COVID vaccines that it did not pick up and did not pay for,” Poland will “have to pay for this extreme stupidity.”
Romanian Health Minister Alexandru Rogobete similarly attributed the current situation to “poor decisions taken at the time by a previous government,” Turkish news outlet Hürriyet Daily News reported from a Wednesday press conference.
The European Union did end up striking an agreement with Pfizer and BioNTech to reduce the amount of doses purchased through the original deal in 2023 in order to match “evolving needs,” European officials said at the time. In 2024, Bourla tied the contract fluctuations and vaccine uncertainty to a “big overhang" over the company's stock performance.
“We had multibillion-dollar contracts with multiple governments in the world, but suddenly, although they were signed, they had second thoughts if they want to [honor] them or not because they are governments,” he said at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, adding that “one of the most famous of that was in [the] EU.”