The textual content messages exchanged between European Fee President Ursula von der Leyen and the pharmaceutical boss through the Covid-19 pandemic had been seen by her prime advisors and will have been destroyed. New York Instances Reported on Friday (August 1, 2025). | Photograph Credit score: AP
The textual content messages exchanged between European Fee President Ursula von der Leyen and the pharmaceutical boss through the Covid-19 pandemic had been seen by her prime advisors and will have been destroyed. New York Instances Reported on Friday (August 1, 2025).
Von Der Leyen and Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla exchanged messages as Covid-19 destroyed the European group from Portugal to Finland, and the EU scrambled to seek out hundreds of thousands of vaccines. She was underneath intense scrutiny in honor.
US newspapers have taken the European Union’s administrative division to courtroom after refusing to share their messages underneath the Bloc’s Transparency Act. In Might, the courtroom stated the committee couldn’t present a dependable rationalization for the decline in entry.
In a letter to The period The committee dated July twenty eighth, Von Der Leyen Cupboard Secretary Bjoern Seibert appeared into the cellphone she used and its signaling app final month and stated “we could not discover a message to correspond to the reason given to the newspaper’s request.”
Seibert additionally checked her cellphone in 2021 and stated he found that calls between Von Der Leyen and Bourla weren’t held as official paperwork, solely to make sure that calls between Von Der Leyen and Bourla could possibly be positioned as wanted.
The committee argues that textual content messages and different “ephemeral” digital communications don’t essentially represent paperwork of curiosity that needs to be preserved or revealed.
Von Der Leyen himself was chargeable for figuring out whether or not the textual content constituted a doc of worth and worth.
The committee additionally stated within the letter that her cellphone had been changed “a number of occasions” and “a number of occasions” for the reason that final time she was changed in mid-2024. Her cupboard stated that the outdated messages weren’t saved and that the cellphone was “formatted and recycled.” Critics accused Von Der Leyen and Seibert of centralizing the focus of the EU’s sturdy enforcement division and strictly controlling the overview of the assorted coverage committee members and reviewing overview communications.
Von Der Leyen survived the vote of no confidence within the European Parliament on July tenth. This was the primary vote in opposition to the President of the Fee for over a decade, and was invoked partly on a textual content messaging scandal known as Pfizergate, a suspicious allegation of authorised misuse of EU funds and election interference.
