EU COVID‑19
Vaccine Contracts

Table of Contents

What the Documents Establish

This document is about three straightforward questions:

• What happened to the people of Europe between 2020 and 2022?
• Who made the decisions that affected them?
• Why did those decisions take the form they did?

Four Hundred and Fifty Million European citizens were subjected to a procurement process that transferred enormous sums of their money to private corporations, stripped those corporations of all legal accountability for harm, compelled participation through access restrictions that cost people their jobs and freedoms — and was conducted through private communications that have since been destroyed. The officials responsible face no criminal consequences. The corporation that benefited most was re-awarded contracts and its CEO was jointly honoured with the Commission President at a Washington ceremony while under investigation.

• The EU's €35 billion Pfizer contract was negotiated by Commission President Von der Leyen through private text messages with Pfizer CEO Bourla — not through any transparent procurement process. Those messages have been deleted or declared lost. The EU General Court found this implausible. The EPPO is investigating for destruction of evidence, corruption, and conflict of interest. She was re-elected Commission President in July 2024.
• Von der Leyen was installed by Macron — a former Rothschild banker whose first major deal was for Pfizer. Rothschild & Co simultaneously published an admiring investor interview with Pfizer on their own website during the procurement period. This is their own publication. On their own platform.
• Von der Leyen's husband was appointed Medical Director of a pharma company receiving EU funding in September 2020 — the same month procurement strategy was being finalised. Not disclosed. Not investigated.
• Both contracts transferred every euro of legal liability for adverse events away from Pfizer and Moderna and onto citizens. Pfizer bore no accountability for harm. Citizens did. This was redacted from the public versions so no one would know.
• Every signatory government formally acknowledged in writing that long-term effects were unknown — then told citizens the science was settled. People were threatened with loss of employment for declining a product their own governments had contractually acknowledged was incompletely understood.
• Within 90 days of rollout, Pfizer's own surveillance identified 1,291 adverse event categories across 42,086 case reports. The FDA asked that this be hidden for 75 years. A federal court ordered earlier release. The people being injected were not told.
• The EMA confirmed in writing that the vaccines were never authorised to prevent transmission. Transmission prevention was the justification for vaccine passports that excluded people from restaurants, transport, employment, and education. The scientific basis did not exist. The exclusions happened anyway.
• Parliament voted against compulsory vaccination — 378 to 296. The government then implemented near-identical compulsion through executive ordinances that did not require parliamentary approval. Democracy was bypassed by design.
• Merkel blocked the TRIPS IP waiver throughout 2021 — protecting the same pharmaceutical monopolies that the contracts her protégé had negotiated had guaranteed.
• The private communications between Von der Leyen and Bourla — the messages that would answer who instructed whom — have been destroyed.

What Was Hidden and Why

The European Commission concluded Advance Purchase Agreements on behalf of all 27 participating Member States under Emergency Support Instrument (EU) 2020/521. The formal signatory was Commissioner Kyriakides. The actual negotiator, by Von der Leyen's own admission to the New York Times, was Von der Leyen herself.

Under Article 7 of the framework agreement, participating Member States agreed not to negotiate separately with the same manufacturers — locking all 27 into whatever terms the Commission had agreed.

What Was Redacted — and Why It Matters

The redactions were not random and not primarily about trade secrets. The pattern is precise: everything that would have caused public outrage was hidden; everything that provided political legitimacy was left visible. What follows is a full accounting of what was concealed — in both contracts — and what it meant.

PFIZER / BIONTECH — CONFIRMED REDACTIONS

• Art. 1.7 — Price per dose. The entire pricing section was redacted. The tiered structure — €17.50/dose for the first 100 million, €13.50 for the next 100 million, averaging €15.50 — was completely hidden from the public, from parliamentarians, and from the citizens paying for it. There was no competitive tender. Pfizer named its price to a captive buyer who had already agreed not to negotiate with anyone else. citizens and their elected representatives had no means to assess whether the price was reasonable, excessive, or extortionate. The sole basis for public trust was the government's assurance that it had negotiated well — an assurance that could not be verified because the price was hidden.
• Art. 1.8.1 — Advance payment of €700 million. Paid before a single dose was delivered. Before regulatory authorisation was received. The destination bank account — Pfizer Inc. EUR Account, Citibank Dublin, Ireland — was also redacted. seven hundred million euros of public money was committed irrevocably before the product was approved. Citizens had no way to know this had happened, no way to assess the risk, and no recourse if the product never received authorisation. The bank account destination was redacted so there was not even a paper trail visible to the public.
• Art. 1.6.3 — Delivery schedule. Dates and quarterly volumes were redacted. citizens could not verify whether deliveries were on schedule. Governments could accept late, incomplete, or substandard delivery without any public accountability. The contract contained no visible penalty for failure to deliver.
• Art. 1.6.9 — Storage temperature of -75°C and the suppressed safety datasheet. The extreme cold chain requirement was redacted. At the same time, the occupational safety datasheet — which classified the active mRNA substance BNT162b2 at OEB5, the highest possible occupational hazard band, with toxicological properties described as "not thoroughly investigated" — was also suppressed. Download links were redacted. BioNTech could not produce the datasheet when the German Federal Ministry of Health formally requested it. It was not archived online until December 2022 — after millions of doses had been administered. healthcare workers drawing this substance into syringes were legally entitled, under workplace safety law, to full hazard information before handling it. That information required respiratory protection, full body protective clothing, and double gloves. They were not given it. The people being injected were not told that the manufacturer's own safety classification described the substance's toxicological properties as not thoroughly investigated. This is not a procurement story. It is a deliberate suppression of legally mandated safety information from the workers administering a substance and the citizens receiving it.
• Art. 1.6.12 — Risk of loss. The clause transferring all physical and financial risk to Member States upon delivery was entirely redacted. from the moment doses were delivered, every loss — spoilage, wastage, unused doses, cold chain failures — fell on governments and therefore citizens. They bore the risk without knowing they had agreed to it. Hundreds of millions of doses were subsequently destroyed unused across Europe. The cost fell on citizens. Pfizer bore none of it.
• Art. 1.12 — Indemnification: the most consequential redaction. Pfizer was indemnified against virtually all adverse outcomes. The only exceptions were wilful misconduct — defined as acts "willingly and knowingly committed with the intent to cause harmful effects," a standard that requires proof of deliberate intent to harm and is practically unreachable — and GMP manufacturing failure, but only where it leads to a regulatory recall AND the EMA's CHMP issues a scientific opinion confirming the failure. Pfizer controls the legal defence of all third-party claims and chooses its own counsel — at Member State expense. The liability cap toward Member States is 50% of sums received under that state's order form. citizens could not know their governments had waived the right to sue Pfizer for harm. The manufacturer bore no meaningful legal accountability. The only route to liability required proving deliberate intent to harm — a standard that has never been met in pharmaceutical litigation anywhere in the world. Citizens who were harmed had no legal recourse against the company whose product harmed them. Their governments had signed that right away — and hidden the fact that they had done so.
• Art. II.6.6 — Sovereign immunity waiver. Each Member State was required to represent that it had "adequate statutory or regulatory authority and adequate funding appropriation" to completely fulfil its indemnification obligations — effectively waiving sovereign immunity protections. this clause meant that if enough citizens were harmed to exhaust normal state budgets, the state had already represented it could still pay. There was no ceiling on citizens' exposure. The state had committed, in advance, to unlimited indemnification of a private corporation — and hidden this commitment from its citizens.
• Art. 1.9 — Signatories. The names of Pfizer's relationship manager Janine Small and signatory Nanette Cocero were redacted. accountability requires knowing who signed and who managed the relationship. Anonymising corporate signatories in public procurement contracts worth hundreds of billions of euros is without precedent. It means the individuals personally responsible for the terms cannot be identified by the public or called to account.
• Definitions section — "Fraud" redacted. In the definitions section of the contract, the entry for "Fraud" — setting out what constitutes fraudulent conduct under the contract — was itself redacted. the definition of what constitutes fraud in a public contract worth hundreds of billions of euros was hidden from the public. Citizens could not know what standard of conduct their governments had agreed to treat as fraudulent, or whether the definition was so narrow as to make fraud practically impossible to establish.
• Order Form, Art. 4 — The acknowledgement that was signed. This clause was not redacted — it was simply never publicised. Every participating Member State signed the following: "The Participating Member State acknowledges that the long-term effects and efficacy of the Vaccine are not currently known and that there may be adverse effects of the Vaccine that are not currently known." every government that mandated or compelled vaccination through access restrictions had already formally acknowledged, in a signed legal document, that the long-term effects were unknown and that unknown adverse effects might exist. They told citizens the opposite. The signed acknowledgement was sitting in a contract that had been redacted so citizens could not read it.

MODERNA — CONFIRMED REDACTIONS AND ADDITIONAL FINDINGS

• Price: US$22.50 per dose (~€19 at 2020 rates). Fully redacted. 80 million initial doses plus an option for 80 million more — maximum commitment up to approximately €2.9 billion. Payment: 20% on signing, 40% on marketing authorisation, 40% on delivery. Bank account: Bank of America & BAMLI DAC Zurich. Moderna's per-dose price was higher than Pfizer's average and also fully hidden. The total financial exposure — up to €2.9 billion — was concealed from the citizens whose money it was.
• Advance payment of €318,471,338. Payable within 15 days of signature. Fully redacted. over three hundred million euros committed before authorisation, before delivery, before the product specification was finalised. Hidden.
• Indemnification — interpreted broadly in Moderna's favour. Indemnification applies regardless of whether losses originate from testing, development, manufacture, delivery, distribution, sale, administration, use, or deployment. It is explicitly "to be interpreted broadly in favor of indemnification." The liability cap is only 20% of amounts paid — lower even than Pfizer's 50%. Moderna's Article II.5.4 states explicitly: "The indemnity provisions set forth herein are essential inducements to the contractor entering into this APA." Moderna told the EU Commission it would not sign without full indemnity. The Commission accepted. Moderna required full indemnity as a condition of signing. The EU gave it to them. Citizens were not told this negotiation had taken place or what had been conceded. The "broadly interpreted" standard means the company's lawyers, not courts, determine what qualifies for indemnification.
• Manufacturing partners — redacted. Lonza AG (Basel/Visp) for drug substance; ROVI Pharma (Madrid) for fill/finish. Both substantially funded by the advance payment. Fully redacted in public version. citizens could not know which companies were actually manufacturing the product going into their arms, who was responsible for quality control at each stage, or that public money was flowing to those manufacturers via the advance payment.
• Annex VI — Product specifications not final at signing. The product specification annex, signed at the same time as the contract, states: "The safety of the vaccine is currently being evaluated in clinical trials." "The efficacy of the vaccine is currently being evaluated in clinical trials." "The duration of protection of the vaccine is currently being evaluated." No co-administration data existed. the EU Commission signed a binding contract committing hundreds of millions of euros of public money to a product whose safety, efficacy, and duration of protection were all, by the contract's own terms, unknown. Citizens were told the vaccines were safe and effective. The contract said otherwise — in the annex that was not made public.

The pattern across both contracts is identical. Redactions fell into three categories: financial commitments that would have caused outrage; risk and liability transfer that would have caused legal challenges; and operational details that would have revealed the product's incomplete state. What was left visible — the recitals about saving lives, the references to regulatory oversight — provided political legitimacy. What was hidden — the price, the liability waiver, the unknown safety profile, the advance payments, the sovereign immunity concession — would have made both contracts politically impossible to defend. These were not commercial redactions. They were political ones. They were enforced by confidentiality clauses that private corporations wrote into contracts with sovereign governments — and those governments accepted them.

Pfizer / BioNTech Price Structure (Unredacted)

Liability Transfer

Both contracts transferred all liability for adverse events from the manufacturers to the Member States and ultimately to citizens. The companies were indemnified for any liability arising from the use and deployment of the vaccines. This provision was redacted from the publicly released versions.

Intellectual Property

Both contracts grant Pfizer and Moderna sole ownership of all IP generated during development — IP substantially funded by EU taxpayers through advance payments. This connects directly to Merkel's blocking of the TRIPS waiver, which would have permitted other manufacturers to produce vaccines using that IP without licensing restrictions.

What Was Known and When

Pfizer Post-Marketing Report (5.3.6)

Within 90 days of rollout, Pfizer had identified 1,291 adverse event categories of special interest across 42,086 case reports. This was submitted to the FDA, which sought to withhold it from public release for 75 years. Federal court orders required earlier disclosure. Member States were contractually indemnifying Pfizer against losses from these events while citizens were told the vaccines were safe without qualification.

Comirnaty Occupational Safety — OEB5 Classification

The Comirnaty occupational safety datasheet classifies the active mRNA substance at OEB5 — the highest hazard band for occupational exposure. Toxicological properties are described as "not thoroughly investigated." The datasheet requires respiratory protection, full body protective clothing, and eye protection when handling the substance.

This document was not proactively distributed to healthcare workers administering it, as required by workplace safety law. Download links from official sites were redacted. BioNTech appeared unable to locate the document promptly when requested by the German Federal Ministry of Health.

EMA Confirms: Not Authorised for Transmission Prevention

"COVID-19 vaccines have not been authorised for preventing transmission from one person to another. The authorised indication is protection of the vaccinated individual only." European Medicines Agency — Letter to MEP Marcel de Graaff et al., 18 October 2023 (EMA/451828/2023)

Transmission prevention was the stated justification for vaccine passports and access restrictions that functionally compelled vaccination across Europe without formal mandate. The EMA's written confirmation means those restrictions lacked the scientific basis on which they were publicly justified.

The Documented Network

Every connection shown here is established by primary sources. No inference beyond the documented evidence is asserted.

Documented Network — EU COVID Vaccine Procurement  ·  All connections primary-source verified

The Key Individuals

Accountability Table

The Network in Detail

The individuals above did not emerge independently. They form an interlocking network of relationships — educational, professional, and institutional — that shaped both who made the decisions and why those decisions followed the pattern they did. Every element below is individually documented and uncontested.

Rothschild & Co — Self-Published Evidence of Pfizer Proximity

In April 2021 — during the peak of EU vaccine procurement — Rothschild & Co Wealth Management published on their own website an investor interview with Pfizer's Investor Relations Officer Bryan Dunn, conducted by their own equity analysts.

This is not a journalist observing the connection from outside. It is Rothschild & Co documenting their own relationship with Pfizer, on their own platform, as routine wealth management content. The openness signals confidence, not concealment — the behaviour of a network that does not consider its position problematic because the system that would hold it problematic is the same system it operates within.

The Macron–Rothschild–Pfizer Documented Chain

• Macron worked at Rothschild & Cie Banque (2008–12), rising to Managing Director in two years — unusually rapid ascent, earning approximately €3 million
• First major deal: brokering Nestlé's $11.8bn acquisition of Pfizer's baby food division (2012) — his first documented professional relationship with Pfizer
• Financial Times named him David de Rothschild's protégé in 2018; Rothschild described his presidential rise as "the planets aligning"
• Macron installed Von der Leyen as Commission President at the 2019 European Council
• Von der Leyen negotiated the EU's €35bn Pfizer contract by private text message in 2021
• Rothschild & Co simultaneously published their own investor interview with Pfizer — April 2021
• Merkel — Von der Leyen's 14-year patron — blocked the TRIPS waiver protecting Pfizer's IP monopoly throughout 2021

The Atlantic Council Ceremony — 10 November 2021

The Dual-Axis Structure

Von der Leyen is the hinge point. Both axes converge on the same corporate beneficiary: Pfizer — €35bn in contracts negotiated off the record, liability transferred to citizens, IP protected by a G7 veto, evidence subsequently destroyed.

The Family Dimension

Von der Leyen's husband Heiko became Medical Director of Orgenesis — an American biopharmaceutical company active in COVID-19 vaccine development — in September 2020, the same month EU procurement strategy was being finalised. Orgenesis subsequently received EU funding. Von der Leyen did not publicly disclose this in relation to her procurement role.

Compulsion Without Mandate

Formal vaccine mandates were rejected democratically in Germany — the Bundestag voted against compulsory vaccination on 7 April 2022 (primary proposal defeated 378–296). Near-equivalent compulsion was implemented by executive action through the 2G/3G access restriction system — bypassing the same parliamentary scrutiny that had defeated formal mandates.

Think about what that meant for individual people. A teacher in Bavaria who had recovered from COVID and had demonstrable natural immunity could not enter her school without vaccination under 2G rules. A bus driver in Hamburg who declined on conscientious grounds lost the right to use public transport. A student in Munich was excluded from university libraries and lecture halls. None of these exclusions were based on evidence that the vaccine prevented transmission — the EMA had never said it did.

People lost jobs, income, and relationships. Some lost businesses built over decades. Some faced social ostracism from families and communities. All of this happened on the basis of a false premise — transmission prevention — while the contracts that transferred all liability for any resulting harm to those same people were hidden from view.

Merkel, the Stasi, and the Sealed File

A parallel accountability problem exists regarding Merkel's past in the German Democratic Republic — following the same structural pattern as Von der Leyen's deleted text messages: the person with most to lose controls whether the evidence is seen.

Maaßen's Statement — January 2025

Hans-Georg Maaßen — former President of the Verfassungsschutz (Germany's domestic intelligence service), dismissed by Merkel — stated publicly:

"The release of Ms. Merkel's Stasi file is necessary in the interest of democracy, because citizens have a right to know whether they have been governed by a former operative of the Stasi and/or the KGB. If she had merely been a low-level employee of an administrative agency, her file would have had to be released long ago." Hans-Georg Maaßen, January 2025 — Former President, Bundesverfassungsschutz

Maaßen's statement carries particular weight: he held the highest domestic intelligence position in Germany, was dismissed by Merkel, and his phrasing implies the file should have been released automatically if it were merely an administrative victim file — suggesting he has reason to believe it is not.

The March 2026 Court Ruling

Marcel Luthe brought a lawsuit before the Berlin Administrative Court to force release of Merkel's Stasi file. On 13 March 2026, the First Chamber found that Luthe had "no legal claim to the release" under the Stasi Records Act. He was ordered to pay €20,000 in costs. The file remains sealed.

The mechanism: the Federal Archive classifies Merkel's possible file as a non-perpetrator file — triggering personal data protection provisions. Without Merkel's own consent, the file cannot be released. Merkel refuses to consent.

Documented Anomalies from Merkel's DDR Years

• Permitted to travel to West Germany multiple times without family members held as hostages — the standard DDR practice for controlling citizens with Western contacts
• Made foreign trips to the Soviet Union, Poland, and Czechoslovakia — unusual at her professional level
• At least three colleagues at her institute (Central Institute for Physical Chemistry, Academy of Sciences) were registered Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (unofficial Stasi collaborators)
• Her later political patron Lothar de Maizière — who gave her first political role in 1990 — was subsequently identified as Stasi IM "Czerny"
• Held the position of Secretary for Agitation and Propaganda in the FDJ leadership of her institute — a role requiring ideological reliability and reporting on colleagues
• Despite documented infractions including smuggling Solidarność materials, she faced no disciplinary consequences — highly unusual in the DDR system

What Is and Is Not Established

Not proven: That Merkel was Stasi IM "Erika" or any registered informant. Historian Hubertus Knabe concluded: "There is no evidence whatsoever for the claim that Chancellor Merkel worked for the Stasi under the codename 'Erika.' If a corresponding IM file had existed, traces of it should still remain — and that is not the case based on current knowledge."

Established: Merkel enjoyed privileges in the DDR inconsistent with her official status. Her professional environment was heavily infiltrated. Her first political patron was a confirmed Stasi informant. Her file exists. She refuses to release it. The court accepted her refusal.

The Structural Pattern

In both cases, the institutional system that would compel disclosure is the same system that accepted the explanation for why disclosure cannot happen.

Corrected Source Attribution

Earlier research sessions contained a citation error: material about the Merkel/Von der Leyen relationship was incorrectly attributed to the Rothschild & Co website. That website contains only their investor interview with Pfizer. The Merkel/VdL material is sourced to Foreign Policy and France 24, corrected below.

Summary Findings

The following are established beyond reasonable dispute by the primary source record:

• Von der Leyen personally conducted vaccine procurement through private communications with Pfizer's CEO. Those communications have been destroyed or declared lost. The EU General Court found this explanation implausible.
• Von der Leyen was installed through a backroom deal engineered by Macron — a former Rothschild banker whose first major deal was for Pfizer, described as a Rothschild protégé.
• Rothschild & Co simultaneously published their own investor relationship with Pfizer on their own website — self-generated primary evidence of proximity to the corporate beneficiary of the contracts their protégé had installed the Commission President to negotiate.
• Von der Leyen's 14-year political patron Merkel simultaneously blocked the TRIPS waiver protecting pharmaceutical IP monopolies globally — the same monopolies guaranteed in the contracts.
• Von der Leyen's husband's pharmaceutical appointment was undisclosed during the procurement period.
• Both contracts transferred all liability to citizens while companies retained IP funded by public money.
• Member States explicitly acknowledged unknown long-term effects in signed contracts while telling citizens the opposite.
• Pfizer's 1,291 adverse event categories identified within 90 days were sought to be withheld for 75 years.
• The EMA confirmed in writing that vaccines were not authorised to prevent transmission — the stated justification for access restrictions used to functionally compel vaccination.
• Formal mandates were democratically rejected. Near-equivalent compulsion was implemented by executive action, bypassing the same parliamentary scrutiny.
• Merkel's Stasi file is sealed at her own request. The court system accepted her refusal to consent to release. The classified-as-victim determination cannot be verified without access to the file itself.
• No principal actor faces criminal charges. Von der Leyen was re-elected Commission President in July 2024.

⬇ Download full report as Word document (.docx) — Version 10 · May 2026