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South Africa was “forced to overpay” for vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic, forking out 33% more than the African Union price for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
Documents released by the Health Department to a multi-stakeholder group, also showed that the government paid the Serum Institute of India two-and-a-half-times more for a generic version of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine compared to the United Kingdom.
The Health Justice Initiative recently won a landmark court ruling that ordered the Health Department to hand over contract documents relating to four COVID-19 procurement agreements, which the group made public on Tuesday.
According to a statement, the document shows the ‘’pernicious nature of pharmaceutical bullying" and evidence of the heavy-handedness of the International Vaccine Alliance, GAVI.
HJI said the COVID-19 contracts reveal punitive, one-sided conditions so that South Africa was forced to hand over sovereignty, with none of the contracts agreed under South African legal jurisdiction.
"This deference to and fear of powerful pharmaceutical companies -in the middle of a crisis and in a Constitutional democracy, is incredibly concerning," said HJI Director, Fatima Hassan.
She said it showed how much power was placed into the hands of private sector actors and how few options governments had, when acting alone, in the middle of a pandemic.
"In our scramble for desperately needed vaccines, South Africa was forced to hand over unimaginable sums of money for overpriced vaccine doses. We were bullied into unfair and undemocratic terms in contracts that were totally one-sided," Hassan said.
She said put simply, pharmaceutical companies held South Africa to ransom, which begged the question; "Did they do it to other countries too?"
The HJI statement relates to part 1 of their court application, with the Department of Health committing to providing additional information by 29 September.
