Hungary buys Covid vaccines from Moderna in 'open' tender
The aim of the NNGYK's three-part open tender was to provide the right amount of vaccine for different age groups. The tender was for 100,000 doses (with an additional 150,000 doses as an option) for children aged 16 and over, 800 doses for children aged 6 months to 11 years, and 200 doses for adolescents aged 12 and over. The procedure was preceded by a market consultation.
Only dutch Moderna Netherlands B.V. submitted bids for the first two parts of the tender and was awarded both contracts.
The third part was unsuccessful as no applications were received by the deadline. As a result, Moderna will be able to supply vaccines to Hungary for a total amount of HUF 4,611,884,000.
Although the current vaccine procurement process is supposed to be transparent, according to an earlier Telex article,
the terms were set in such a way that no one but Moderna could bid.
It was also revealed that the NNGYK has contracted a separate distributor for the storage of the purchased vaccines and related services. The vaccines will be delivered to a cold storage warehouse in Hungary, located at the Budapest site of Hungaropharma Zrt.
Hungaropharma Zrt. is one of the leading players in the Hungarian pharmaceutical wholesale market, with its owners comprising major pharmaceutical companies such as Béres Gyógyszergyár Zrt., EGIS Gyógyszergyár Zrt., Richter Gedeon Nyrt. and Magyar Gyógyszer Vagyonkezelő Zrt.
Gov't tries to portray pandemic management as a success story
Billions spent without public procurement, companies tied to the government profiting from the pandemic, hidden data, governance controlled by hand, government propaganda, 50,000 deaths: all of these cast a shadow over the government's perceived success in managing the coronavirus pandemic.
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has uploaded a video to Youtube on Sunday, praising how the government managed the Covid pandemic. Átlátszó collected several facts to show the true face of the supposedly laudable dealings.
In the summer of 2023, the portal wrote that the government spent HUF 722 billion of public money during the pandemic without public procurement. The data were sued by K-Monitor from the Ministry of Interior. The National General Directorate of Hospitals spent the most, HUF 127 billion. In second place was the Ministry of Foreign Affairs with HUF 116 billion, and in third place was the State Health Care Centre with 87 billion for purchases without public procurement. Apart from the various health institutions and the Foreign Ministry, which managed ventilators, other state agencies were also exempted from public procurement rules by the Operative Task Force.
The pandemic hospital in Kiskunhalas was built for gross HUF 5 billion by ZÁÉV, and interest of Lőrinc Mészáros, a former gas fitter in PM Orbán's hometown Felcsút who is now country's richest man, and West Hungária BAU (WHB), another construction company with ties to the government. The hospital was not in operation for long but its overheads cost taxpayers HUF 5.3 billion a month.
WHB and another company owned by Lőrinc Mészáros benefited from the pandemic in other ways. Viresol, the starch factory of Viktor Orbán's childhood friend, received a total of HUF 2.5 billion in two tranches, West Hungária Bau, majority-owned by Attila Paár, received HUF 3.5 billion, and Hungerit Zrt. owned by OTP Bank Chairman-CEO Sándor Csányi received a total of HUF 2.4 billion in two tranches from Eximbank.
The 'national consultation' on the pandemic and post-pandemic re-opening cost over HUF 9.5 billion. The order was placed by the Prime Minister's Office to New Land Média Ltd., owned by Fidesz's favourite communications expert, Gyula Balásy. The ads were placed in pro-government newspapers.
The Foreign Ministry bought a total of 16,863 ventilators for just over HUF 300 billion. Most of the machines are still gathering dust in a warehouse, rented for HUF 15 million a month. The overpriced purchase certainly benefited one company: Fourcardinal Ltd, dubbed the NER's favourite "pandemic company", made a profit of almost HUF 16 billion in 2020 on a Covid turnover of HUF 49.5 billion - and the owners took almost all of it out of the company in the form of dividends.
Nemzeti Együttműködés Rendszere (NER, English: System of National Cooperation), the network of political and cultural institutions and private corporations closely aligned with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán or with the national-conservative Fidesz party in Hungary.
The government also bought 1,000 ventilators from Celitron, a Dutch-Israeli company based in Vác. The machines were made at a time when hundreds of billions of forints worth of equipment from China was already in stock. The government contract made Celitron billions in profit in 2020, but by 2021 it was making losses again, and there is no trace of the fans on its website.
The government also spent a fortune on vaccines, e.g. HUF 55 bn on Sinopharm shots from China, which benefited Danubia Pharma Ltd. The man behind the transaction may have been Márk Szeverényi (and his business circle), who is the brother-in-law of László Szabó, who was once Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó's deputy.
Every sixth post on the epidemiological information page was propaganda. Data have always been scarce, and mortality figures were almost certainly underestimated. Nevertheless, for a long time, Hungary was on top of the ranking of Covid deaths by population and still is the third in the world.
And let's not mention the state of danger declared in March 2020 that was supposed to facilitate a rapid policy response to emergencies in the pandemic, but the Orbán cabinet liked it so much that it kept extending it under various pretexts and it is sill in place, allowing governing by decree.
