The EU’s coronavirus vaccine prices were made public by accident last week. Belgium’s State Secretary for budge and consumer affairs Eva De Bleeker (or somebody from her communications team), tweeted a table with the price of each vaccine purchased by the EU and how much Belgium will spend in total on the vaccines, reported the Belgian news site HLN. The tweet has since been deleted, but HLN managed to save and publish a screenshot beforehand.
According to the screenshot published by HLN, the EU is spending between €1.78 and $18 per coronavirus vaccine, meaning that the most expensive vaccine (Moderna) costs nine times more than the cheapest one (Oxford/AstraZeneca). The price per dose listed for each of the six vaccines was as follows:
Civil society groups, MEPs and health advocates have been calling for months for the Commission to reveal how much the EU is paying for the ordered vaccines, saying that deals involving taxpayer funds should have greater transparency. But the European Commission has refused to do so, saying it cannot reveal the prices because of commercial confidentiality agreements.0
De Bleeker told HLN that the publication of the price breakdown was “a mistake on the part of the communications team.”
The European Union ordered a total 33.76 million doses from these pharma companies at a cost of €279 million.
Title image: Eva de Bleeker and the vaccine prices shared by accident on her Twitter account on December 17, 2020. (Photo: Facebook/Twitter)
