Tribune. The G7 countries, which are meeting this weekend in the UK, have reportedly struggled to manage public orders for masks, vaccines and other medical supplies during the pandemic, but they are wary of good to let it know, as shown the tool for monitoring public contracts on Covid set up by theOpen Contracting Partnership : the content of these contracts – beneficiaries, amounts, clauses, responsibilities – is very rarely or very partially accessible to the public. In Japan, for example, no information is published!
In addition to wasting time and money, frequent “misfires” have claimed the lives of many people.
Considerable sums wasted
In Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States, companies created in a matter of weeks and with no experience in the health field have won contracts worth several million euros for essential supplies. Considerable money has been wasted on faulty, missing or late delivery masks, ventilators and other equipment; some agreements were made via WhatsApp!
In France, while the Commission for Access to Administrative Documents (CADA) declared that a public health service should not invoke “Trade secrets” to justify withholding information on its agreements with mask suppliers, investigative journalists had to rely on whistleblowers to document the shortages …
Journalists and civil society groups should not have to fight for information about these contracts. In addition to the direct threat to health, this lack of transparency undermines confidence in governments, sows doubt and confusion among an already worried public.
As we have entered the vaccination and economic recovery phase, the stakes are rising again. Developing vaccines at such speed is certainly an unprecedented triumph of international collaboration and innovation in times of crisis. Money is pouring in, cumulative vaccine spending set to hit $ 157 billion [environ 129 milliards d’euros] by 2025. But no one will be safe until everyone is safe.
Secret and lower price?
Secrecy about information such as delivery schedules and problematic responsibility directly affects the effectiveness of immunization program planning. Pharmaceutical companies claim that the secrecy observed in the contracts allows them to offer lower prices to the poorest countries, but the little evidence available suggests that the opposite is happening!
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