Oh dear, can the EU do anything right at the moment? This morning, the bloc escalated its battle with the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca by publishing its vaccine purchase contract with the company online.
The EU was hoping the move would bolster its demands for AstraZeneca to hand over vaccine doses meant for the UK, to make up for shortages at the firm’s European factories.
As you would expect with such a sensitive document, large portions were redacted when the contract was published by the Commission. Only it seems the EU didn’t do a very good job removing the sensitive information…
In the original draft published, it appears the EU included a series of pdf ‘bookmarks’ which mistakenly revealed the opening lines of almost every paragraph in the document – even the redacted material. As a result, sensitive commercial information was freely distributed online. It didn’t take long for the EU to pull the offending document, but even so, it may be that the damage has already been done.
Mr S can reveal that the un-redacted details included: the ‘confidential’ price the EU paid for its 300 million doses, price caps, termination periods and late payment information. For legal reasons, Mr S is not able to publish details of the redacted material at this stage.
The EU probably has other things to worry about though. As Steven Barrett points out, the contract includes a beefy confidentiality clause that the courts will definitely be interested in now. Oops…
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