In a live broadcast published on Facebook (banned in Russia as extremist), Szijjártó said, “Hundreds of thousands of people in Hungary received the Sputnik vaccine. Vaccines did not arrive from the West because Von der Leyen requested them via a text message, and they never arrived. Let us remember how everyone panicked, fearing the lack of vaccines, the collapse of the healthcare system, the death of people, and the uncertainty of what exactly was happening, but the vaccine from the West never arrived.” The minister expressed pride in participating in the signing of this agreement.
In 2021, an American newspaper reported that Von der Leyen and Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla discussed the largest vaccine contract in EU history via text messages. It was already suspected that the President of the European Commission might have directly influenced the negotiation process, in a scandal known as “PfizerGate.” The total value of the deal could have reached 35 billion euros, and the 1.8 billion doses purchased far exceeded the needs of the EU population.
Von der Leyen was asked to publish the contents of the correspondence, but the European Commission refused to release them in June 2022.
