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In defiance of conflict of interest, the EU has entrusted PwC with a study on antibiotic resistance

In defiance of conflict of interest, the EU has entrusted PwC with a study on antibiotic resistance

Antibiotic resistance is one of the most worrying health emergencies that the world has to face and the EU has commissioned a study proposing adequate medical measures to combat it to PwC, which however often and willingly offers consultancy to Big Pharma such as Pfizer, Gsk, AbbVie, Roche and Bayer. Are we sure it will be impartial? Tino Oldani's article for ItaliaOggi

The purchase of Covid-19 vaccines by the EU Commission, led by Ursula von der Leyen, has been lauded for months as an example of good governance in a united Europe. A myth, a model whose praises I too have sung. Over time, however, some questionable aspects came to the surface, and slowly the myth lost its initial credibility, until it turned into a protest, not to mention an accusation. In fact, it happens that several EU countries, including Italy, are asking the EU Commission to renegotiate the purchase contracts for the Covid-19 vaccine with Pfizer, given that the enormous quantity of serums that the US multinational had managed to sell abroad The EU has proved to be excessive both in numbers and in costs.

Of all the vaccine suppliers, Pfizer had taken the lion's share, securing a collection of 35 billion euros out of the 71 billion committed by EU contracts. A cost put by Brussels to be borne by the individual EU countries, based on the supplies of vaccines completed and those still to be delivered, despite the fact that the epidemic has been over for many months. Result: hundreds of thousands of Pfizer doses, provided for in the contracts, remain unused in warehouses and risk being destroyed, but with the obligation to be paid to Pfizer. Ditto for the doses still to be delivered. For Italy, there is talk of 170 thousand doses in storage and 60 thousand to be delivered, a waste that the Minister of Health, Orazio Schillaci, is trying to avoid: for this reason, together with colleagues from other countries, he has put pressure on the EU Commission because renegotiate contracts with Pfizer. The same did the Minister of Health of Germany, Karl Lauterbach, who declared 160 million doses "useless" and asked not to receive any more. Poland is tougher: months ago it announced that it would no longer pay for excess Pfizer doses, and so it did.

According to sources in Brussels, following the pressure received, the EU Commission is apparently trying to renegotiate the contracts, but so far without success. Meanwhile, the barbs against von der Leyen continue, accused of having personally negotiated the purchase of 1.8 billion Pfizer doses, exchanging text messages with Albert Bourla, CEO of Pfizer, without notifying the competent EU offices. The European Public Prosecutor's Office has opened an investigation, given that it is "an extremely high public interest". And the EU parliament has set up a special Covid commission, which for months has been summoning the protagonists of Pfizer contracts to a hearing. The latest meeting was held last Monday, with the EU Health Commissioner, Stella Kyriakides, from Greece, as the protagonist, who during a heated debate, in response to the accusations against von der Leyen for not having provided text messages or purchase contracts, he said: «The president of the EU Commission was not involved in any negotiations for the contract for the Covid-19 vaccines. I've said it before and I'll say it again: there was a negotiating team and a steering committee." All cleared up? Not for a dream. The clauses of the Covid contracts with Pfizer were secret from the beginning, and have remained so despite the request for access made in early March by Roberta Metsola, president of the EU parliament.

In this scenario, the hypothesis of a subjection of the EU Commission to the Big Pharma multinationals finds confirmation in the response that the Euro-bureaucracy has given so far to the conclusive solicitations of the O'Neill Report ( ItaliaOggi yesterday) on the dangers of antibiotic resistance. In other words, the risk of millions of deaths a year in the world, up to ten million in 2050, if Big Pharma and the US and EU governments do not take action as soon as possible to discover and produce stronger antibiotics than those currently on the market, drugs capable to defeat the bacteria which for years, following the abuse of antibiotics and other factors, have been infecting and killing a growing number of patients, exceeding antibiotic protection: 1.7 million deaths in the last year, against the 700,000 expected in 2016 by the Report.

A disaster, argues O'Neill, which in 2050, or perhaps earlier, will be such as to "make Covid look like a garden party". While Evelina Tacconelli, one of the leading experts in the fight against antibiotic resistance, interviewed in the investigative book by Cataldo Ciccolella and Giulio Valesini ("The great investigation of Report on antibiotics: why they no longer work"; Chiarelettere), states: "If we lose the effectiveness of antibiotics, we lose the effectiveness of modern medicine. In practice, the most complex surgical interventions, such as those on tumors, on the heart, for the replacement of organs, to name a few, would become impossible.

Well, faced with this epochal risk, what was the EU's response? Unbelievable: a preliminary study, costing 900 thousand euros, entrusted to the Belgian branch of PwC, PricewaterhouseCooper, one of the four global giants of auditing and consultancy. All in defiance of the obvious conflict of interest: among the partners who habitually entrust millionaire consultancy to PwC there are in fact the major multinationals of Big Pharma, such as Pfizer, Gsk, AbbVie, Roche and Bayer. And when the authors of the investigative book pointed out the conflict of interest to Hadea, the EU executive agency for health and digital, it replied that it had trusted PwC, without carrying out any checks.

The investigations revealed that PwC entrusted the study to a team of young researchers who know about finance and the environment, but nothing about healthcare. "If they had asked me or some academics, and there is no shortage of them in Europe, we would have written it for free, with a reimbursement of expenses", confessed a health director. "The risk is that the final study is biased towards multinationals." That is in favor of Big Pharma, which in order to invest in new antibiotics is waiting for the problem to explode in the media and on TV. Thus he will have an easy time asking for public billions for research and for higher prices, as he did with Covid.


This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/economia/in-barba-al-conflitto-di-interessi-lue-ha-affidato-a-pwc-uno-studio-sullantibiotico-resistenza/ on Sun, 02 Apr 2023 05:45:27 +0000.