Romanian Prosecutors Request Criminal Inquiry into Former PM’s Billion Dollar Spend on Unused Pfizer Vaccines

Governments worldwide have disbursed substantial sums, amounting to tens of billions of dollars, to pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer for COVID-19 vaccines that will remain unused due to insufficient demand.

In a recent development, the Romanian Senate has granted permission for prosecutors to scrutinize Florin Citu, who served as Romania’s prime minister in 2021, for allocating $1.1 billion towards the purchase of 53 million mRNA COVID-19 vaccine doses from Pfizer. Remarkably, these acquired vaccines were never used in Romania.

Florin Citu, is presently a senator within the ruling Liberal Party, a role that ordinarily grants him immunity from prosecution. However, on Thursday, anti-corruption prosecutors in Romania formally requested parliament and the president to authorise a criminal inquiry into the actions of the former Prime Minister and also of his former health ministers.

Florin Citu led a centrist coalition government after the December 2020 general election, which was in power for less than a year amid the peak of the coronavirus pandemic, with Vlad Voiculescu and Ioana Mihaila, who were both members of the junior party USR and served as health ministers in his administration.

Abuse of Power

The investigation centers on suspected abuse of office related to the procurement of COVID-19 vaccines. The prosecutors aim to scrutinize Citu, Voiculescu, and Mihaila for allegedly acquiring an excessive number of Pfizer and Moderna vaccine doses between January and May 2021 without proper documentation or assessments justifying the scale of the purchase, but Florin Citu has emphasised that he exercised his duties as prime minister “in accordance with Romanian legislation.”

Under Romanian law, prosecutors need parliament’s and the president’s approval to investigate and detain sitting lawmakers and former cabinet ministers for graft offences allegedly committed while they were in office, according to Reuters, who add that “Lawmakers have a patchy record of approving such requests, but Citu has been a vocal critic of the current coalition government which includes his party, ahead of local, European, general and presidential elections in 2024.”

Unfortunately for Citu, but rightly so, the Senate voted 90-2 to lift that immunity to enable the investigation to move forward, Romanian news outlets reported. Source All three may be charged with “abuse of power” (also translated as “abuse of office”), prosecutors have said.

SOURCE

The Fall of the mRNA

The criminal investigation is the latest sign of how far, and how fast, mRNA Covid shots have fallen, particularly in Europe, according to Alex Berenson, who says, “In May 2021,European countries were so desperate to get mRNAs that they agreed to spend over $20 billion to buy 900 million Pfizer shots – on top of 600 million they had already purchased. (The May deal included an option to buy yet another 900 million shots, for 1.8 billion total – four shots for every person in the EU.).”Source

During that period, Europe had been trailing behind both the United States and the United Kingdom in COVID-19 vaccinations, so there was significant pressure on European leaders to bridge the gap. It had been initially anticipated that AstraZeneca’s DNA vaccine was to contribute substantially to Europe’s vaccine supply; that was until the product was withdrawn following the safety concerns emerging about its vaccine and the link to blood clots.

As a consequence, the mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna dominated the market in wealthy nations with Pfizer, in particular, accelerating its manufacturing at a faster pace than Moderna, resulting in a more abundant supply of vaccine doses over the months.

The European Union

The European Union happily agreed to pay 19.5 euros per jab – almost $24 based on exchange rates at the time. (The doses were to be split proportionally among EU members so they would not bid against each other for them.) (Source) “Good news for our long term fight to protect European citizens against the virus and its variants!” Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, crowed in a press release announcing the deal. “Production and delivery in the EU of up to 1.8 billion doses are guaranteed.”

In May 2021 a report from Brussels announced that the European Commission had signed a third contract with BioNTech-Pfizer for an additonal 1.8 billion doses. SOURCE

Western European countries passed the United States in the percentage of the adult population they vaccinated, and demand remained relatively high for the first booster dose in winter 2021/22. But after the mRNA jabs proved largely worthless against Omicron infections, demand collapsed in Europe, as it did in the United States. (Europe was always more skeptical than the United States of the value of Covid jabs for infants and children under 12.).

Germany was reported to have binned 83 million doses of coronavirus vaccines in July, at an approximate cost of €1.6 billion and a further 120 million more doses were sitting as unused stock, according to Politico, “even as it is set to receive more jabs at a time when vaccination has flatlined” […] and “according to data provided by the country’s health ministry, Germany scrapped 54 million COVID-19 vaccine doses by the end of 2022 and another 29 million in the first quarter of 2023.”

“However, the real tally is likely to be higher. The ministry didn’t provide waste figures for the second quarter of the year and also stressed that federal states and health care providers aren’t required to report vaccine waste. “Accordingly, a total volume of total disposed COVID-19 vaccine doses acquired by the Federal Republic of Germany cannot be quantified,” it said in an email to POLITICO.

Hundreds of millions of shots bought by the United States have also expired unused, though American health authorities have never provided even a ballpark estimates, Alex Berenson writes, “But the oversupply problem is worst in poorer Eastern European countries, where demand for the jabs is lower – and the budget hit harder to tolerate. Last week, Pfizer sued the government of Poland to force it to pay about $1.5 billion for 60 million shots the Poles do not want. In Romania, which is even smaller and poorer and has strong anti-vaccine sentiment, the anger is even deeper.” —Source

The Romanian Sense of Smell

The Romanian vote now means that their National Anticorruption Directorate, or DNA, can officially open an investigation into Citu and the former health ministers, as the DNA requested last week in making a 27-volume-report to the Senate. The prosecutors claimed their initial investigation showed that Citu and the other ministers ordered the shots without considering the demand or need for them.

Health Minister Voiculescu, however, is denying his part, saying the purchase decisions were “exclusively made by the prime minister” and the former Prime Minister Citu, too, has denied any wrongdoing, and says “I fully trust the justice act and I am convinced the ongoing procedures will uncover the truth and “he has always respected the law.”

The truth is they are all complicit and were happy enough to follow an agenda without question, lining the pockets of Big Pharma and their stakeholders. While the accused may have respected the law, they certainly did not respect the people of Romania, who were the European Union’s second-least vaccinated state after Bulgaria.

Reuters, who still tout the World Health Organization data, which they say showed the “virus has killed 68,590 people to date in the country of 20 million” of course attributed this to “poor vaccine education.” Nevertheless, they also say that they have been “plagued by distrust in state institutions” which is certainly more accurate. As one commenter Unreported Truths stated: