Most bill collectors phone your house. Pfizer (PFE) looked up. Poland and Romania owe the drugmaker $2.2 billion for unwanted Covid-19 vaccines. To collect, it won court approval in July for a lien — a legal claim on money until a debt is paid — on fees airlines pay to cross those countries’ skies. That’s the money that pays their air-traffic controllers.
Who owes whom, and why
It starts in 2021. Negotiating for all 27 member states, the European Union locked in hundreds of millions of Covid-19 doses in a landmark deal. Pfizer, which developed the shot with BioNTech (BNTX), committed to making and delivering it locally. Signed at the height of the scramble for shots, the deal left Europe with far more doses than it needed.
Other EU countries settled their way out. Poland and Romania didn’t. In early 2022, Poland said it could no longer afford 63 million more doses, and Romania soon followed. In April, Pfizer won a yearslong legal fight holding both to deals for more than 90 million shots. From Poland it’s pursuing €1.3 billion, roughly $1.5 billion, a sum the health minister compared to the country’s yearly spending on cancer drugs. Romania owes another €600 million.
Follow the airline money
Here’s the plumbing. Airlines pay fees to fly through a country’s airspace. In the U.S., they pay the Federal Aviation Administration directly. In Europe, a regional body called Eurocontrol collects the fees and passes them along to each country. Pfizer’s lien freezes Poland’s and Romania’s cut. For Pansa, Poland’s air-navigation agency, that money is more than 80% of the budget, says its chief executive, Magdalena Jaworska-Maćkowiak.
The strain shows. Pansa got emergency government funding less than 24 hours before it would have run out of cash, she says. Romania’s agency, Romatsa, cut salaries 20% for its 1,700 staff before winning a reprieve last month. Both agencies say Pfizer is putting air safety at risk. “I’m here for air-traffic management, not for fighting with Pfizer,” Jaworska-Maćkowiak said.
Pfizer calls its moves a measured way to uphold its contract, and says the court’s ruling shows how much Europe’s pandemic response relied on contracts being honored. Eurocontrol recently won protections against liens like these, but they didn’t take effect until Aug. 9, too late for this case. Both countries have appealed, with hearings set for October and January.