You're listening to you're listening to EU Watchdog Radio.

Welcome to a new episode of EU Watchdog Radio.

My name is Hans Van Schare, media officer at Corporate Europe Observatory, also known as CEO.

And welcome to part two of this special summer episode in which we tell the true story

on how the European Union has been dealing with the pandemic during the past year

and why the EU seems to have a deep love affair with Big Pharma.

In two parts of this podcast, several experts explain that the European Commission,

the executive branch of the EU, not only has a very Eurocentric way of dealing with the pandemic,

but also acts and decides in complete secrecy on how it negotiates on our behalf with powerful

pharmaceutical companies.

In the first part of this podcast, CEO researchers Olivier Hudeman and Kenneth Haar explained

what they found out about the weird and secretive ways of the European Commission and the

Council.

Their complete lack of transparency suits very well the agenda and business models of the powerful pharmaceutical industry.

We are now July 2021 and the COVID-19 pandemic is still raging in many parts of the world, in countries in Africa, in India,

Indonesia and so on.

And while many Europeans are happy to able to go on holidays and again enjoy certain freedoms,

thanks to their COVID-19 vaccine, in low and middle-income countries, most people can only dream of having access to such

a vaccine. The head of the World Health Organization warned on July 12th that the gap in COVID-19

supplies is hugely uneven and not equitable. He said countries and regions should not order more millions of doses before other countries have supplies to vaccinate their health workers and most vulnerable people,

especially when the Delta variant is driving a new spike in COVID-19 cases and deaths.

The production of vaccines need to be scaled up urgently, experts have been saying for many months.

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