Foto: BB.LV / прививка
According to the president of the Latvian Association of Family Doctors, Alise Nicmane-Aishpure, family doctors currently have mainly high-dose flu vaccines intended for people over 60 years old. However, there are no free or paid vaccines available for younger adults and children starting from six months of age. The shortage has also affected patients with chronic diseases, for whom the flu is particularly dangerous. The Disease Prevention and Control Center (SPKC) explains the delay by problems with vaccine production in Europe. The next batch is promised to be delivered to Latvia by November 13. Family doctors hope to receive it by November 18. The absurdity is that the country is overflowing with COVID-19 vaccines, even though the demand for them is significantly lower. According to SPKC, as of October 26, 18,779 residents have been vaccinated against the flu at the state's expense this season (and many more would gladly get vaccinated if the vaccine were available!), while only 1,764 people have been vaccinated against coronavirus. And this is not the first year that anti-COVID drugs have gone unused. In September 2025, Latvia purchased about 50,000 doses of the updated Pfizer vaccine. Meanwhile, over 123,000 doses were already sitting in warehouses (!) - they remained from the previous season. This means we do not need that many; it’s time to shout “pot, don’t boil!” But it continues to boil because that is stipulated by the notoriously famous contract that Ursula von der Leyen negotiated during a phone call with Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla. This correspondence subsequently disappeared without a trace, and even the EU court could not obtain a clear explanation of where it went. As a result, governments across the EU are now forced to purchase these unfortunate vaccines and destroy them, as they are no longer needed. Even a small country like Latvia had to destroy 606,594 doses of COVID-19 vaccines in the first half of 2024, of which 487,234 doses were produced by Pfizer, and the rest by Novavax. In 2025, we destroyed another 83,508 doses of Pfizer. In total, the procurement, storage, transportation, and disposal of these vaccines cost us a tidy sum: 4.26 million euros. Now imagine how many hundreds of millions of euros these unnecessary purchases amount to for the entire EU! The reason lies in the tricky terms of the contracts concluded by the European Commission. In May 2021, it signed contracts with Pfizer and BioNTech to acquire 900 million doses of the vaccine with the option to order the same amount again. Thus, the total volume of the agreement could reach 1.8 billion doses. The price of one dose was 19.50 euros. If the entire planned volume had been purchased then, the cost of the agreement would have reached approximately 35 billion euros. But in 2023, when the demand for vaccinations sharply declined, the European Commission had to negotiate a reduction in purchase volumes under pressure from European governments. Unfortunately, not as drastically as the governments insisted, and with the condition that deliveries would be stretched until the end of 2026. As a result, Latvia received about 193,000 doses in 2025 according to the schedule, and another 156,000 in 2026. Annual expenses for purchases alone were estimated at about 5 million euros, and even more crazy money will now have to be spent to properly dispose of the vaccine. And this is in conditions where there is a catastrophic shortage of funds for healthcare! The most ironic part is that we cannot sell the excess vaccines (Pfizer prohibits it). And it is even impossible to give them away for free. For example, in February of this year, the Latvian government decided to donate 51,840 doses of the Pfizer vaccine, already purchased by Latvia for 1.13 million euros, to Ukraine. However, it later turned out that this was impossible. The reason was the terms of the contracts between Pfizer and the Ukrainian side, which Ukraine did not agree to take on. By the way, the story of such a burdensome European contract with Pfizer raises huge questions not only among European citizens but also among the press and investigators. The head of the European Commission stubbornly refused to provide journalists access to the correspondence, and when in May 2025 the EU court ruled that this refusal was unlawful, she stated that there was nothing to show: the correspondence was deleted. And recently, on October 28, 2026, Politico reported that von der Leyen has still not given personal testimony to the European Prosecutor's Office, which is investigating the circumstances of the vaccine purchases. Investigators are examining possible violations of official duties, destruction of messages, corruption, and conflicts of interest. But this is not easy to do, as the head of the European Prosecutor's Office, Laura Kövesi, stated that some high-ranking politicians consider themselves above the law and ignore the calls of investigators.
