“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.

Over more than one year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the European Commission has held meetings primarily with representatives of Big Pharma or the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (1) and associated organizations like ‘Global Citizen’. The Commission has listened almost exclusively to this echo chamber which pushes protecting Big Pharma patent rights, despite the way they are exacerbating global vaccine apartheid.

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 study released today by the European Commission on products from new GM techniques like CRISPR-Cas shows that the institution has been lending its ears almost entirely to the biotech industry. The study suggests that the current EU GMO rules may not be “fit for purpose” for some new GM applications. It is a clear first step to the deregulation of these techniques, which would mean no safety checks for the environment or public health, nor consumer labelling. This outcome cannot be seen separately from the decade-long lobby campaign by the GM industry and developers calling for deregulation

The biggest pharmaceutical companies have proved to be staunch opponents of sharing technology on COVID vaccines and medicines. In particular, they are fiercely opposed to a proposal to temporarily suspend intellectual property rights on vaccines and medicines for the duration of the pandemic, as proposed by India and South Africa at the World Trade Organization. And after lobby meetings the European Commission basically agreed to the wishes of the pharmaceutical industry.

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.

Several industry EU lobby groups are about to be entrusted again the privilege of co-deciding how €9.6 billion of public EU research funding should be used, in research areas as essential as healthcare, transportation, energy, biomass-based manufacturing processes or IT infrastructures.

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?