Poland’s health ministry is appealing a Brussels court ruling that ordered the country to accept and pay for around €1.3 billion worth of COVID-19 vaccine doses it says it does not want. The case is a dispute about contract law, but the argument underneath it is about how governments buy things during an emergency.

How the doses were ordered

During the pandemic, EU member states bought vaccines collectively through advance purchase agreements negotiated by the European Commission. The structure was deliberate: buying as a bloc gave more leverage with manufacturers than twenty-seven separate negotiations, and avoided member states bidding against one another.

An advance purchase agreement is a commitment to buy quantities that do not yet exist, made before anyone knows whether the product will work or how much will be needed. That is the point of it — manufacturers will not build capacity for a product nobody has committed to buy — and it is also the source of every subsequent dispute. The contracts were signed under conditions of maximum uncertainty and are now being read under conditions of hindsight.

Poland’s position and the counter-argument

Poland’s case, in outline, is that circumstances changed fundamentally — the emergency ended, demand collapsed, and the country took in a very large number of refugees from Ukraine at the same time — and that it should not be required to take delivery of and pay for doses it has no use for.

The manufacturer’s position, and the one the Brussels court has so far accepted, is that a contract signed is a contract owed. On this reading, the entire value of an advance purchase agreement to the supplier lies in the buyer being bound even when demand disappoints — that is precisely the risk the manufacturer was paid to take off its own books. Allowing one state to walk away would, the argument runs, make such contracts worthless in the next emergency.

Both positions are coherent. That is what makes the case genuinely difficult rather than simply a story about a government trying to avoid a bill.

Why the sum is large enough to matter

€1.3 billion is a meaningful figure against any national health budget, and it is money that would be spent on doses rather than on treatment, staff or equipment. Whichever way the appeal goes, the amount does not disappear; it is either paid to a manufacturer or absorbed as a loss somewhere else in the arrangement.

There is also a precedent question that reaches beyond Poland. Several member states ended up with more doses than they could use, and the terms under which the bloc contracted have been the subject of political argument for years, including over how much of the contracting process was made public. A ruling that binds one government tightly to the original terms establishes what the others can expect.

The lesson being argued over

The useful question is not whether the contracts were a mistake. It is what a better version would have looked like, given what was knowable at the time.

Procurement specialists generally point to mechanisms that were available and under-used: options rather than firm commitments, tiered volumes tied to epidemiological triggers, explicit termination clauses with defined break costs, and provisions for redistributing surplus doses to countries that had none. Each would have cost more per dose. Whether governments negotiating in early 2021, under acute pressure and with no certainty that any vaccine would work, could realistically have insisted on them is a harder question — and it is the one a court is not being asked to answer.

Sources

• Current events summary — Poland appeals the Brussels ruling on unwanted vaccine doses (Politico EU)