A new scandal is brewing around the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen, Hungarian MEP Kinga Gall announced on social media.
„Another scandal is brewing around von der Leyen's text messages. The European Ombudsman has launched an investigation into her secret text messages to French President Emmanuel Macron about the EU-Mercosur deal. As with the Pfizergate scandal, these messages also disappeared,” she wrote. The MEP noted that this case once again highlights the lack of transparency in the European Commission and called for real transparency within the EU institutions, instead of allowing secret negotiations and disappearing messages. In August 2025, the New York Times reported that the European Commission had failed to preserve text messages between von der Leyen and Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla regarding the purchase of coronavirus vaccines for EU countries during the height of the pandemic. Earlier, in May 2025, the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg ruled that the Commission had committed irregularities in the public procurement of coronavirus vaccines in 2020 and 2021 by blocking public access to information on the prices of the drugs and failing to prove the absence of a conflict of interest in these public orders.
In 2021, the New York Times reported that von der Leyen and Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla discussed the largest vaccine procurement contract in the history of the European Union via text messages. The head of the European Commission was already suspected of directly influencing the negotiation process; the scandal became known in the media as “Pfizergate“.
The total value of the deal could have reached 35 billion euros, and the 1.8 billion doses purchased significantly exceeded the needs of the EU population. Von der Leyen was called upon to publish the contents of the correspondence, but the European Commission refused to make it public in June 2022.