Text messages exchanged between European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and a pharmaceutical boss during the COVID-19 pandemic were seen by her high adviser and have likely been destroyed, the New York Times reported on Friday (August 1, 2025).
Von der Leyen and Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla exchanged the messages as COVID-19 ravaged European communities from Portugal to Finland and the EU scrambled to purchase thousands and thousands of laborious to discover vaccines. She was below intense scrutiny to ship.
The U.S. newspaper took the European Union’s govt department to court docket after it refused to share the messages below the bloc’s transparency legal guidelines. In May, the court docket stated the fee had failed to present a reputable clarification for declining entry.
In a letter to the Times dated July 28, the fee stated von der Leyen’s head of cupboard, Bjoern Seibert, had final month examined the telephone she makes use of and its Signal app and “did not find any messages corresponding to the description given” within the newspaper’s request.
It stated Seibert additionally checked her telephone in 2021 and located the messages solely helped to be sure that calls between von der Leyen and Bourla could possibly be organized as wanted, so that they were not saved as official paperwork.
The fee insists textual content messages and different “ephemeral” digital communications don’t essentially represent paperwork of curiosity that must be saved or made public.
Von der Leyen herself was liable for deciding whether or not the texts constituted paperwork of worth and price protecting.
The fee additionally famous in its letter that her telephone has been changed “several times” for the reason that messages were exchanged, the final time in mid-2024. Her cupboard stated the previous messages were not saved and the telephones were “formatted and recycled.” Critics accuse von der Leyen and Seibert of centralizing energy within the EU’s highly effective govt department, tightly controlling who works within the cupboards of the assorted coverage commissioners and vetting communications.
Von der Leyen survived a July 10 no-confidence vote within the European Parliament, the primary towards a fee president in over a decade, which was known as partly over the textual content messaging scandal dubbed Pfizergate, the alledged misuse of EU funds and uncertain allegations about election interference.
