Verbatim report of proceedings

Wednesday, 10 February 2021 - Brussels

The state of play of the EU’s COVID-19 Vaccination Strategy (debate)

  Nils Torvalds (Renew). – Madam President, we had some frank exchanges of views earlier, so I think it’s time for conclusions and not for being too angry. And the conclusions could be actually summed up by ‘what did you learn in school today?’ ‘What did you learn in the EU today, dear Commission of mine?’

One, we needed to have had the Parliament with us from the very beginning, and the contact group is a very good step in that direction. Two, when we spend the amount of money we are now going to spend, we need an open-source approach. And when Linux started to do open source, the big companies came against, among other persons, my son.

And then today they have learned that open source was something which was actually in their interest also and in the interest of mankind. Third, we need a European law on transparency, and when this comes from the Commission, I will say: ‘yes, we did it’.