EU should have given public greater access to Covid contracts, court adviser says – POLITICO

The European Commission should have been more transparent with the public about its multimillion-euro Covid vaccine contracts, an EU court adviser said.

Advocate General Athanasios Rantos said it was impossible to tell whether the Commission staffers negotiating these contracts with drugmakers were impartial, given that the EU executive only published “anonymised versions of declarations of no conflict of interests.”

The Commission’s lawyers had argued at the Court of Justice of the EU that revealing who exactly worked on the contracts could have opened them up to abuse from “conspiracy theorists.”