Pfizer has filed a lawsuit against Poland because the country doesn’t want to buy more contracted doses of the company’s COVID-19 vaccine.
Pfizer has sued the government of Poland for alleged failure to buy 60 million contracted doses of its COVID-19 vaccine, according to reports and Polish officials.
A spokesperson for Poland’s health ministry, Iwona Kania, told local news outlet TVN24 on Thursday that over a year of negotiations failed to yield a compromise over tens of millions of contracted doses that Poland doesn’t want to buy—and so Pfizer has filed a lawsuit.
Pfizer’s civil suit, filed earlier this week in Brussels, Belgium, demands that the Polish government pay roughly $1.5 billion for the 60 million doses of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine that Polish authorities said last year they no longer want to purchase, according to Polish news outlet Dziennik Gazeta Prawna, which was the first to report on the terms of the suit.
While Polish government officials have said that they hope there’s still a chance that the lawsuit might end in some kind of a settlement, for now, it appears that Warsaw’s 19-month struggle to back out of the deal—or modify the terms of the contract with Pfizer—is heading for a courtroom battle.
Polish authorities have justified their refusal to buy the contracted doses by the massive financial burden the country has suffered due to the influx of Ukrainian refugees fleeing the war in Ukraine.
Poland has taken in more Ukrainian refugees than any other European country amid the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
‘Force Majeure’
Last year, Poland requested a change of its contract with Pfizer for 60 million outstanding doses of its COVID-19 vaccine, citing a “force majeure” clause in the contract.
Warsaw said that the burden of taking in millions of refugees from the war in nearby Ukraine, as well as the economic impact of the conflict, justified a rejigging of the contract terms.
“There’s been a change in the epidemiological situation—though mostly it’s the geopolitical situation—and so the contracts for COVID-19 vaccines must change as well,” then chief of Poland’s health ministry, Adam Niedzielski, told the PAP Polish press agency in April 2022.
By Tom Ozimek
