EU Chief’s texts to pharma boss throughout pandemic had been possible erased, say media studies

Textual content messages exchanged between European Fee President Ursula von der Leyen and a pharmaceutical boss through the COVID-19 pandemic had been seen by her high adviser and have possible been destroyed, the New York Occasions reported on Friday (August 1, 2025).

Von der Leyen and Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla exchanged the messages as COVID-19 ravaged European communities from Portugal to Finland and the EU scrambled to purchase hundreds of thousands of exhausting to seek out vaccines. She was below intense scrutiny to ship.

The U.S. newspaper took the European Union’s government department to courtroom after it refused to share the messages below the bloc’s transparency legal guidelines. In Could, the courtroom mentioned the fee had failed to supply a reputable clarification for declining entry.

In a letter to the Occasions dated July 28, the fee mentioned von der Leyen’s head of cupboard, Bjoern Seibert, had final month examined the cellphone she makes use of and its Sign app and “didn’t discover any messages akin to the outline given” within the newspaper’s request.

It mentioned Seibert additionally checked her cellphone in 2021 and located the messages solely helped to make sure that calls between von der Leyen and Bourla could possibly be organized as wanted, in order that they weren’t stored as official paperwork.

The fee insists textual content messages and different “ephemeral” digital communications don’t essentially represent paperwork of curiosity that must be saved or made public.

Von der Leyen herself was accountable for deciding whether or not the texts constituted paperwork of worth and price protecting.

The fee additionally famous in its letter that her cellphone has been changed “a number of occasions” for the reason that messages had been exchanged, the final time in mid-2024. Her cupboard mentioned the outdated messages weren’t saved and the telephones had been “formatted and recycled.” Critics accuse von der Leyen and Seibert of centralizing energy within the EU’s highly effective government department, tightly controlling who works within the cupboards of the varied coverage commissioners and vetting communications.

Von der Leyen survived a July 10 no-confidence vote within the European Parliament, the primary towards a fee president in over a decade, which was referred to as partly over the textual content messaging scandal dubbed Pfizergate, the alledged misuse of EU funds and uncertain allegations about election interference.