Articles

Big Pharma is currently waging a fierce lobbying battle to protect its monopoly patent rights for COVID-19 vaccines and treatments. While Corporate Europe Observatory broadly outlines the sector's lobby spending, this is likely to be an underestimate of Big Pharma's true firepower; and up-to-date lobbying information and details are hard to come by. Weak EU lobby transparency rules are hampering the public scrutiny that is more needed than ever now during the pandemic.

“The Ombudsman is concerned about the potential risk of conflicts of interest.” These concerns led the European Ombudsman’s office to launch an inquiry into the European Defence Agency’s handling of the request by its former Chief Executive to allow him to become a lobbyist for Airbus.

CEO is hiring two new colleagues to join our communications team.

Who meets the European Commission to discuss the scarcity of COVID vaccines and medicines in Europe and globally? An investigation of recent meetings show a disconcerting pattern: only those not questioning big pharma’s monopoly on patents seem to be allowed in. While mega-philanthropist Bill Gates and the pro-patent lobby are a powerful force influencing the EU’s response, proponents of COVID technology-sharing face closed doors.

In this new episode of EU Watchdog Radio we dive into the issue of plains, trains, cars and bicycles aka transport policy and why this is such a powerful issue in the context of climate change and healthy societies.

The self-serving arguments used by big pharma lobbyists at meetings with the European Commission to defend monopoly intellectual property rights on vaccines are demonstrably false. Corporate Europe Observatory has uncovered new documents from December 2020 which reveal how big pharma’s arguments – essentially, to ‘keep the patents in our hands, and trust us to distribute vaccines’ – contrast sharply with the current state-of-affairs: few in low-income countries will be vaccinated any time soon.

The European Commission proposes to have industry co-decide how €9.6 billion of EU public research money should be used. The Member States now have to decide if they accept expanding the highly problematic model of EU Joint Undertakings, very large industry-driven public-private research partnerships, in the EU’s new research funding programme Horizon Europe.

In this new episode of EU Watchdog Radio we dive into the covert lobby tactics used by the biotechnology industry to get a new generation of GMO’s to be used in agriculture, deregulated in the EU. Why are agrochemical companies like Bayer and Corteva to against having European safety rules? And why is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation financing this lobby-campaign?

CEO and The Good Lobby have written to Mr Koen Lenaerts (President of the Court of Justice of the European Union) to express concern about the fact that ECJ Advocate General Giovanni Pitruzzella participated in an event on vaccine patents co-hosted by a pharmaceutical industry lobby group. The event - an online roundtable on March 22 2021 - was hosted by the Aspen Institute Italy in cooperation with Farmindustria, the Italian pharmaceutical sector lobby group.