An influential legal opinion delivered in Luxembourg on 11 June has nudged the European Commission closer to surrendering the secrecy that has shrouded its pandemic-era vaccine purchases. An advocate general at the Court of Justice advised that the institution’s appeal against a 2024 ruling, which had ordered it to hand over documents about its Covid-19 contracts, should be dismissed. The opinion is not binding, but advocates general are followed in a clear majority of cases, and it lands as one of the most awkward transparency tests the current Commission has faced.
The saga, now widely tagged “Pfizergate”, traces back to the frantic procurement drive of 2020 and 2021, when the Commission signed six advance purchase agreements with manufacturers including Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Moderna, worth a combined sum reported at around 71 billion euros. The most politically charged thread runs through text messages exchanged between Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Pfizer’s chief executive during the negotiation of the bloc’s largest single order. When journalists and lawmakers asked to see them, the Commission said it could not locate the messages, an answer that satisfied almost no one.
What the advocate general targeted was not merely a missing phone log but the wider logic of withholding. By keeping the contracts and surrounding correspondence out of public view, the reasoning runs, the Commission made it impossible for citizens to judge whether the people negotiating on their behalf carried any conflict of interest with the companies on the other side of the table. Even after partial releases, the institution redacted the names of its negotiating team and several contractual clauses, leaning on the protection of individual privacy and the commercial interests of the firms. The opinion treats those justifications as too broad to survive the EU’s own access-to-documents rules.
For the architecture of European accountability, the stakes reach beyond one health emergency. Access to documents is one of the few hard rights that lets outsiders interrogate how money and power move through the institutions. If the bloc’s executive can shield its largest contracts behind blanket claims of confidentiality, the principle becomes decorative. A court that ultimately endorses disclosure would signal that crisis conditions do not suspend the duty to show one’s work, a message with obvious relevance for the defence, energy and digital procurement booms now under way.
The Commission has insisted throughout that it acted lawfully and that commercial sensitivity justified its caution, and it retains the option to argue the point when the full chamber rules in the coming months. Yet the political damage is already accruing. Critics across the political spectrum have used the case to question the concentration of decision-making during the pandemic, and a guilty verdict on transparency, even a soft one, feeds a narrative of an executive that prefers to be trusted rather than checked. The final judgment will decide the documents. The opinion has already decided the optics.
