"German newsweekly Der Spiegel cited anonymous sources involved with the EU's vaccine procurement effort as saying that Macron (apparently even personally) told the EU not to buy the 500 million doses of Pfizer/BioNTech's vaccine that could have been in the November 11, 2020 purchase agreement. At that point, Pfizer/BNT had reported amazing Phase 3 results and were clearly ahead of everyone else, and other governments had already secured huge amounts of that vaccine several months earlier. But Macron didn't want an American-German joint project to save Europe from COVID, so he vetoed anything that would have resulted in Pfizer/BNT selling more doses to the EU than French Sanofi, which at that point had already fallen far behind."