In order for COVID-19 vaccines to be delivered to them, countries must have documentation on their approval by the competent national regulatory body or proof of recognition or reliance on another type of regulatory approval, an import license and signed agreements on damages and liabilities, Pfizer told N1 on Thursday, after the Bosnia’s Council of Ministers Chairman accused the company of “blackmailing” BiH.
Council of Ministers Chairman, Zoran Tegeltija, strongly criticised Pfizer on Wednesday, accusing the company of refusing to deliver the vaccines the country paid for and looking for ways to justify it by setting new conditions.
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“My opinion is that Pfizer wants to buy time to resell these vaccines to someone else at a completely different price than the one we paid for 1,230,000 doses. We want them to meet the conditions. Their obligation is to deliver vaccines to the airport in Sarajevo, everything else is the obligation of BiH,” Tegeltija said, adding that Pfizer’s behaviour is “unacceptable” and that “they don’t have the right to blackmail us because we paid for those vaccines.”
“They have promised us 27,000 vaccines now and it is high time we stopped being nice to them because it is their obligation to deliver what we paid for,” he stressed.
N1 asked Pfizer about the allegations.
“Pfizer is strongly committed to working for equitable and affordable access to COVID-19 vaccines for people around the world. We believe this is a collective responsibility that calls for highly coordinated and joint action by public and private stakeholders to end the COVID-19 pandemic,” the company told N1.
Pfizer said it actively cooperates with governments across the world, as well as with health organisations and completely follows “the guiding principles of the COVAX Facility to ensure that all countries have equal access to safe and effective vaccines.”
“To this end, we were proud to announce our commitment to deliver 40 million doses of our COVID-19 vaccine through COVAX in 2021 and to be one of the first companies to provide vaccines for COVAX for the purpose of vaccinating high-risk populations,” it said.
The company said that COVAX sent an initial dose distribution to Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine on January 29 “based on the country’s interest in our vaccine and the COVAX country readiness assessment.”
“This allocation provides interim guidance to countries and is subject to confirmation by Pfizer upon completion of the assessment in each country. The dose distribution plan is managed directly by Covax,” it said.
“As one of the first companies to provide doses through this newly established mechanism, we are working in partnership with COVAX (Gavi & UNICEF or PAHO) to put this model into practice. Following the completed analyses carried out together with COVAX, it was determined that further discussion was needed in the country to clarify the requirements for supply through Covax,” it said.
Pfizer expressed readiness to cooperate with the government in order to ensure the delivery of the vaccines as soon as possible.
“In order for COVID-19 vaccines to be delivered, countries must have documentation of the national regulatory approval of the vaccine issued by the competent national regulatory agency (or proof of recognition or reliance on another type of regulatory approval, such as WHO EUL), an import license and signed agreements on damages and liability,” Pfizer said.
“We (Pfizer and COVAX) will work with the Government on the steps necessary to enable supplies to resume as soon as possible. The agreement with COVAX is not part of the bilateral agreement between the state of BiH and Pfizer, for which we expressed a clear intention in the fall of last year,” it concluded.
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