I know it’s not the repudiation we hoped for, but the widening displeasure over the deeply idiotic and imprudent contracts that the European Union negotiated with Pfizer and BioNTech for COVID-19 vaccine doses says a lot about where the vaccinators find themselves, politically and socially, at this late hour.
That erstwhile pillar of the vaccinator-industrial complex, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, has revealed a markedly reduced enthusiasm for the vaccines and their procurement in the past months. After attacking the lack of transparency surrounding the contract negotiations, they’ve found the energy to deplore all the worthless vaccine that our health ministers have purchased:
In Germany, by the end of March 2023, around 83 million COVID-19 vaccine doses expired and were thrown away by with the federal government alone. Health Minister Karl Lauterbach (SPD) has informed a private session of Bundestag budget committee of these developments …
These figures raise many questions. Did Germany, especially under Lauterbach’s predecessor Jens Spahn (CDU), but also during Lauterbach’s tenure during the fight against the pandemic, order too much vaccine? Could they have avoided these costs, which reach into the billions? Or did the state have no choice, because it was not foreseeable how many people would get vaccinated, and how many injections would be needed for effective protection in the longer run?
What devastating answers all of these questions have.
In any case, the EU and the Federal Republic of Germany have purchased far more vaccine than is needed now. As the Ministry of Health informed the Bundestag, Germany has donated 120 million vaccine doses to other countries. Even after these donated doses left the central warehouse, further doses nevertheless expired …
The Ministry explains that additional doses have expired “at the various stages” of the supply chain. This refers to doses shipped to wholesalers, pharmacies and doctors’ offices. These parties are in turn responsible for “proper disposal”, the ministry explains. They did not provide figures on how many doses had expired and been destroyed by these wholesalers, pharmacies and medical practices. It is possible that these numbers have not been collected.
In other words: The 83 million figure represents a floor; nobody actually knows or is all that eager to tabulate how many doses have been thrown away.
When asked by the SZ, the Ministry of Health did not say how much the expired and destroyed doses at the federal level cost. Publicly available data nevertheless supports the assumption that the costs to the taxpayer… are in the billions.
And that may not be all.
Through the start of 2023, the federal government had ordered a total of 672 million doses for 13.1 billion Euros, generally via the EU. Each jab therefore costs on average just under 20 Euros … According to the Ministry of Health, by the start of May, around 192 million doses had been injected in Germany, and some of the deliveries are still outstanding.
More than a year ago, the Berlin-based newspaper Tagesspiegel asked whether Lauterbach was threatened with “billions in damages”. At that time, it was already becoming apparent that vaccine could remain unused. In mid-2022, 3.9 million vaccine doses had expired. By the beginning of 2023, there were already 36.6 million vaccine doses. And now, only five months later, it is already 83 million. By the end of last year, approximately 54 million doses had expired and in the first quarter of 2023, approximately 29 million doses had been destroyed, the ministry informed the Bundestag.
Possibly even more vaccine will have to be destroyed. As of the beginning of May, the Federal Government still has stores amounting to around 120 million doses. Their future is “fraught with uncertainty” and depends, among other things, on the future course of the pandemic, the Ministry of Health informed the Bundestag. The Federal Government still intends to give “unneeded vaccine” to other countries.
Not a single country anywhere on earth can be found to take this stuff.
To avoid having to destroy more vaccine, the EU has now negotiated a partial cancellation of supply contracts with the pharmaceutical companies BioNTech and Pfizer. A “cancellation fee” is due for this, Lauterbach informed the Bundestag. According to reports, Lauterbach did not give a figure. The cancellation fees for unwanted vaccine is likely to reach costs in Germany alone of hundreds of millions of Euros.
While the details of the deal are officially secret, an outraged Polish health minister revealed several weeks ago that Pfizer and BioNTech have demanded that EU countries pay 50% of the cost for every previously ordered yet unneeded vaccine dose.
At the end of the article there lurks this foul paragraph:
With early access to safe and effective vaccines, many lives have been saved and millions of people have been protected from serious illness. The economic costs of the pandemic have also been reduced and the “impact on social life has been noticeably mitigated”. The vaccine surplus is a consequence of this strategy. This is how the Ministry of Health justified the bulk purchases in the Bundestag.
We’ve been over this many times at the plague chronicle, but as long as politicians and the press continue to indulge in these hollow excuses, I’ll keep repeating myself: It’s strange indeed that enthusiasm for these SaFE aNd EfFeCtIvE vaccines should have plummeted in precise inverse correlation to public experience with them. You’d almost think that the more the vaccinators were allowed to vaccinate, the more everybody decided the vaccines weren’t for them after all. This is hardly the response you’d expect to such miraculous, life-saving, side effect-free products.
A great many journalists, bureaucrats, politicians and ordinary people were complicit in the excesses of the past several years, and as the policies of the pandemic continue to sour, they’ll do anything but talk about it. This more than anything is the reason for the deafening silence surrounding all of these matters. What critique there is will increasingly attach itself to isolated matters, such as school closures, and to specific initiatives in which few participated directly, such as the buying of vaccines. They’ll do everything they can to assign blame in those few areas, where they can’t be blamed themselves.
This article originally appeared on Eugyppius’s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here.
Stop Press: According to Politico, the European Commission has systematically blocked scrutiny of its COVID-19 vaccine deal with Pfizer.
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It’s good that the DS is getting attention from mainstream sources and that they are driven to increasingly desperate measures. It means a nerve has been hit.
In answer to the question in the title of this article, which I suppose may be rhetorical, I think “never” or “when we win the war” are probable answers.
“Both Reuters and USA Today”
Well that is good news because there might be some remnants of their readership still in possession of marginally functioning brains who may decide that the DS articles are “worth reading in full” for themselves.
I think it is vitally important that DS continues to challenge these myths around climate ‘change’ and so called anthropogenic global warning because the subjects are inextricably linked to the reset / Agenda 2030.
Plain old common sense tells me that a trace gas comprising just 0.04% of the earth’s atmosphere cannot possibly alter climate and planetary temperatures in the way ascribed.
The same common sense tells me that even reducing our so-called Co2 emissions by 50% – see what I did there – from 1% to 0.5% of global emissions, will make bugger all difference to the world’s weather.
The science is settled for me – climate changes and always will do and there is naff all we should be doing about it.
Actually wasn’t climate change / global warming an agreed fictional construct dating from the inception of the Club of Rome and intended simply to invoke and maintain a fear narrative in the proletariat?
Climate change is almost a contradiction because change is inherent in any climate.
Man-made global warming is sheer and utter bullshit designed for thickos and sheep.
Many years ago I used to work for Reuters. Then it was a highly respected and impartial news organisation and I was proud to be an employee.
I find it sad that it has degenerated into just another Globalist Propagandist.
Total atmospheric Co2 = 0.04%. 4% of that is anthropogenic. 1% of that is UK. That’s the UK producing 0.00001% of global Co2.
Where we live our mayor apparently think Co2 is the greatest threat facing Greater Manchester. Divided by the population, this means if we believe what he says, Andy Burnham is bravely fighting 0.0000006% of a gaseous plant food that keeps everything on this planet alive.
Some Russian cosmonauts have said you can smell Andy Burnham’s bullshit from space.
Burnham is a proper See You Next Tuesday Warrior. We even have to tolerate him in Saddleworth. Utter evil.
Has Burnham been on some of those trams (I hear some supporters of the congestion charge try to avoid them)?
Burnham is bringing in pollution charges July 2023. Ten (£10) per day for commercial vehicles. Funnily enough no parts of Greater Manchester have ‘pollution’ levels exceeding their arbitrary limits. The charge was supposed to be installed this Summer but he put it off for a consultation – yeah right.
As usual the party of the working classes is working hardest at crucifying the….erm…working man.
Glad we’ve sorted that out.
I wonder if they’d still lose a referendum on charges?
“The people have spoken – the bastards”.
While I certainly don’t buy the narrative of “catastrophic man-made climate change”, my understanding is that man’s share of atmospheric Co2 is a lot higher than 4%. From around 1850 to the present day, co2 in the atmosphere has risen from 280 ppm (0.028%) to 410 ppm (0.041%), with all or most of the increase being due to fossil fuel usage. Which would suggest man’s share being nearer 30%.
You may be right, but 30% sounds unlikely. Some references are needed! Then we can talk.
They aren’t fact checkers, they are narrative enforcers for the regime, similar to the SS or the ministry of internal affairs in the Soviet Union. Understand these ppl are not interested in the truth, they seek absolute control are evil and deserve no benefit of any doubt.
Politicians and scientists have long had this symbiotic relationship. The government needs to make policy and if it can show that the “science” supports that policy then they can always come back later and say we were only taking the advice of the “scientists”. Scientists need to pay their mortgage and feed their family and if government want to pay them money to look for a purple horse, they are not likely to be in a big hurry to report back that they can’t find any. ——So what we end with isn’t “science”. It is “Official Science”. It is science in support of public policy or “consensus science”. It takes a very brave scientist to question dogma that he suspects might not be the whole truth or is only partially true, or is a pack of blatant lies, for he will simply be replaced. The role of scientists should not be to hide the many uncertainties so that a negotiated consensus can be presented as the “science”. Many governments now have a “Chief Scientist”, but this is so obviously simply to provide a veneer of scientific respectability to pronouncements about public policy. But “climate change” is not just a scientific issue. It is an economic moral and social one. Governments really must balance cost with benefit of policies, and we can see with NET ZERO that not one single question as to cost/ benefit was asked by any politician of any major party. They put ideology and dogma first and people last.
To answer the question posed in the headline – NEVER
Chris thank you for your diligence, much appreciated.
Environmentalism and its sub-cult Climatism is a religious movement. Religions have no facts they have only dogma. Any who do not accept, or challenge or disobey this are heretics and anathema. They must be cast out, their books burned, denied public discourse.
This is not an intellectual argument, or genuine scientific enquiry and the scepticism inherent in that. Climatism is therefore unfalsifiable, just like the existence of God, no evidence, no logic or reason can change the minds of the zealots.
Science, just like religion, has both an evidence-based aspect and a faith-based aspect. All of the world’s religions, for example, have scriptures that form the basis of their practise and belief systems. Much of the content of the scriptures, for example the Bible, can backed up with reference to historical documents, providing evidence that events chronicled in the scriptures actually did happen, albeit perhaps not precisely in the way penned by the original scribes in the language of their time.
However, a large portion of religious scriptures is also open to interpretation, and it is the job of the religious scholar to apply their interpretations in the most meaningful way they can.
Similarly, taking climate science as the most pertinent example here, while we are literally “drowning” in hard data providing evidence that the climate is changing, and that atmospheric CO2 is changing and has changed constantly since an atmosphere came into existence, the faith-based aspect of this science is whether or not we are to blame for the climate and atmospheric conditions; whether or not what is happening currently is net-destructive compared with similar weather events in that past; and whether or not the steps we take to “mitigate climate change” will make any difference to the future of the climate.
In my opinion, an interpretation of data should never be used to inform public policy. For example, moratoria on fracking, curbing investment in fossil-fuel energy production and committing to net zero by 2050, are ALL based on an interpretation leading to a perceived consensus, where even this “consensus” itself is an interpretation of the balance of scientific opinion!
Well said Mr Morrison and please keep saying it.
It’s when you’re over the target that the flak is greatest.
I set up a WhatsApp group with a couple of old university friends about four years ago. Just the three of us. One of them – nameless, obviously – is the Reuters Bureau Desk Chief for Blank Blank. I adore him because, well, he’s one of my many very successful old friends and has helped me out over the years (problems, problems…). We have much in common when talking about music, for instance. And humour. By contrast, I’m nobody and have done nothing of note. But OMG he talks s**t on a variety of subjects. I’ve not yet confronted him with the old Gates/WEF/Conflict of Interest stuff (amply evidenced by many researches I’ve indulged in), and I actually hope I’m never brought to that pitch. But it’s all very trying; despite an old mates’ agreement that we’ll never post in our group anything other than Derek & Clive references and comments on books, music and other pretentious stuff, he will Not Stop posting stuff which to say the least he knows will, er, get my attention. I’m a small-c conservative, he’s a raging leftie. We get by, but only because I don’t lay out my wares, as it were, for him to bloody well think about. As I say, I love him, but he’s a stupid t**t.
Yes, I understand that one well. It’s hard to sometimes share with friends who are on a different trajectory, have fixed ideas about things and think they know what is happening. For the sake of the friendship, you keep schtum, don’t make waves and go along with all the superficial stuff that the friendship is based on. I’ve found that such friendships get stretched over time and that I now have found new friends from the people I know who are switched on and who share my viewpoints. I do keep a lifeline open to old friends but it is no longer so important to me and I’m not bothered about ‘missing out’ – I’m just doing my thing and am forging a new creative life for myself and making friends of all different types, connecting with like-minded souls and other people who I wouldn’t have thought could become important to me. It’s a funny old life for sure.