KYIV, Ukraine – After a revolution seven years ago, Ukrainians discovered that their deposed president had used public money to build him a huge palace with a private zoo, a golf course and a garage full of antique cars.
To prevent such corruption in the future, a series of reforms have been introduced, including a requirement that almost all government contracts be made public so that secret setbacks can fall into the pockets of high-ranking officials.
The refurbishment, widely seen as a rare success in the country’s otherwise halting anti-corruption campaign, covers tens of millions of dollars in annual medical purchases.
But to secure vaccine supplies, Ukraine has been forced to abandon the rule for the most part – a move that, according to the government, is not so much as the demand from the pharmaceutical giants that control supply.
In negotiations with national governments, drug companies, including Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson, have insisted that many of the terms of the deal amount to trade secrets and that they should be kept confidential.
Health advocacy groups have criticized the arrangements, saying that governments much better positioned than Ukraine to spend large sums on doses were too willing to accept such secrecy.
The requirement hampered the Ukrainian government and forced one state-owned procurement company to prevent transplantation into the medical system because it is required by law to disclose the terms of all contracts.
“This is due to extremely strict privacy rules and non-disclosure policies, which the procurement company will not be able to comply with under Ukrainian law,” Svitlana Shatalova, Ukrainian Deputy Minister of Health, told a news conference on Thursday.
The non-disclosure agreements allow pharmaceutical companies to negotiate prices, delivery timelines and other conditions for vaccination transactions without governments or their citizens comparing the agreements with those concluded with other countries.
According to a document mistakenly posted by a European official on social media in December and quickly removed, the European Union has negotiated a cheaper price for Pfizer’s vaccine – 12 euros, or about $ 14.60, per dose – if the U.S. government, which agreed to $ 19.50 per dose. European countries tend to pay significantly lower drug prices than the United States does.
In Ukraine, so far there has been no indication of corruption in the one vaccine trade he has already entered into, and no suggestion that money was stolen in the procurement process.
But to meet the requirements for the secrecy of vaccine manufacturers, the government has been forced to act in a way that is contrary to the beauty policies that the United States and other Western countries have pushed for, according to Ukraine. Minister of Health.
At a meeting of the Ukrainian cabinet this month, the government excluded the state-owned procurement corporation, the Medical Procurement Enterprise, from vaccine negotiations without giving a full explanation.
The Ministry of Health said at the time that it would rather negotiate through an international non-profit group, Crown Agents, which helps developing countries obtain medical supplies. Shatalova’s statement Thursday was the first to link the change to the vaccine makers’ secrecy policy.
The director of the medical procurement company, Arsen Zhumadilov, objected to the change. In an interview, he said his organization was set up ‘as a protection’ to concentrate millions of dollars in purchasing power in one government office for the country’s most socialized medical system – which was a pit of corrupt trade years before the revolution.
Ukraine has already purchased one coronavirus vaccine from the Chinese company Sinovac. In the agreement, Sinovac allowed the Ukrainian government to publish the terms of the agreement, but not all terms. It showed that Ukraine paid $ 18 million per dose for 1.9 million doses, but did not disclose the fees to a Ukrainian company, Lekhim, which acted as an intermediary.
Since the end of last year, the Ministry of Health of Ukraine has come under attack for failing to conclude a vaccine agreement with a Western supplier. Russia has promoted its vaccine, Sputnik V, as an alternative, but many Ukrainians are wary of relying on a country with which they are waging war for the life-saving doses.
In any case, deliveries of vaccines manufactured in the United States will be delayed until later this year under a Trump administration ban on exports until demand in the United States is met. Ukraine has sought vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna and Johnson & Johnson, which experts say will likely get approval for the product from safety regulators in Europe in the coming weeks.
Ukraine, which has registered about 1.2 million cases of coronavirus and about 22,000 deaths, is expected to receive enough vaccines for about 10 percent of its population from February or March from the Covax program, a global initiative aimed at is to work with manufacturers to provide equitable access. to vaccines.