She is only three years old, but the process is as routine as if she had done it thousands of times before. On this far too warm spring day, Milda, a little girl with a short ponytail, puts on the pink waistcoat, which looks like a life jacket, without much grumbling. And somehow it saves Milda.

The girl sits down on the white chair in the kitchen-living room of a terraced house in Klaipėda, a harbour town on the Baltic coast of Lithuania. She puts her inhaler over her mouth and nose. “Shaky, shaky?” asks Urté Gyliené, her mother. Milda nods. It’s time to get the mucus out of her lungs. Milda skilfully closes the fastenings.

You have to imagine what happens next as if the girl is sitting on a jackhammer: the waistcoat is filled with air in bursts by a generator and Milda is shaken to the core. Her whole body shakes, her head, chest and legs. For half an hour, until she coughs vigorously. That was it. The phlegm is out. This happens every morning, before nursery, and every evening, before bedtime. 

Milda has a serious hereditary disease called cystic fibrosis. CF for short. Due to a genetic defect, thick mucus forms which is difficult to remove. This leads to constant infections – with viruses, bacteria and fungi. Milda will only just reach adulthood, the doctors said when the disease was diagnosed. 

In Lithuania, where Milda and her parents live, children with CF only live to the age of 18 on average. By then, the lungs are usually so damaged due to the constant infections that they can no longer breathe properly, and only a transplant can help.

Or, in fact, one medicine. 

It’s called Kaftrio and has been authorised in the European Union since summer 2020. Only Milda doesn’t get it.

The life expectancy of patients with CF has increased significantly in countries where Kaftrio is available. “Not giving this drug costs patients an average of 20 years of life,” says Carsten Schwarz, Medical Director of the Cystic Fibrosis Centre at Klinikum West-Brandenburg. “It drives you crazy when you find out that other countries have such wonderful medicines and you are left behind,” says Milda’s mother.

Kaftrio is still not available on prescription in Lithuania. The US company Vertex from Boston, the only manufacturer of so-called CFTR modulators such as Kaftrio, is demanding a price that the health authorities in Vilnius are unable or unwilling to pay. The government currently estimates the annual costs per patient at 175,000 euros. Too much.

“Where you live should not determine whether you live or die,” said EU Health Commissioner Stella Kyriakides last year. All patients in the EU should have “early and equal access to effective medicines”. Süddeutsche Zeitung, NDR and WDR, together with the journalists’ cooperative Investigate Europe, have investigated the fact that this is still just a pious wish. The reporters spoke to people who get even the most expensive medicines on prescription – and to those who have had to leave their home country, go to court or, like Milda, have to wait a long time for them.

It’s all about secret pricing and the political influence of the world’s most lucrative industry. According to a 2021 analysis by international management consultancy EY, pharmaceutical companies achieve an average return on sales of more than 25 percent – no other industry achieves more. 

Every important medicine that exists in one EU country could actually be available in all member states. This is because new medicines in certain categories are tested and authorised centrally by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) in Amsterdam. However, each country has to negotiate individually with the manufacturers whether and at what price these medicines are then sold in pharmacies in the individual countries – and the prices usually remain secret. This gives the pharmaceutical companies enormous power; they can set the price as high as they want each time. 

Illustration: Alexia Barakou

In fact, innovative, patent-protected drugs are becoming increasingly expensive. The manufacturers of gene therapy drugs such as Zolgensma for spinal muscular atrophy or Zynteglo for sickle cell anaemia charge around two million euros per treatment. Hemgenix, used to treat haemophilia, is currently the most expensive drug in the world, costing 3.5 million euros per dose.

The EU Parliament’s scientific service recently wrote that this practice “imposes costs on society in the form of reduced access to medicines, higher prices, poorer health outcomes, a greater need for care and a higher risk of mortality”. This is because if a country’s healthcare system cannot or will not pay the required price, patients there do not receive the best available medicine, or only many years later when patent protection has expired or there are competing drugs. Such drugs are protected from copycat products for eight years.

The flaw in the system: poor countries pay more than rich ones

A research team from SZ, NDR, WDR and Investigate Europe has now succeeded in providing a plausible estimate of the price of CFTR modulators such as Kaftrio, which are so important for cystic fibrosis patients, in nine EU countries. The reporters put together pieces of the puzzle from Vertex’s sales data, data from health insurance companies, purchasing documents, hospital audit reports and patient numbers. The results show publicly for the first time that smaller and poorer countries sometimes pay much more than wealthier countries – and how often the medicines are not available at all in such countries.

More than 180 new medicines were authorised in the EU between 2019 and 2023, but most of them differ only slightly from those that already exist. However, some of the new substances actually have a major additional therapeutic benefit that significantly improves the treatment of diseases. Together with the Cologne Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG), the team of reporters identified 32 drugs for which this applies. IQWiG regularly determines the additional benefit of new drugs and its analyses form the basis for price negotiations between health insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies in Germany. These 32 important medicines include new drugs for cancer, migraines, diabetes, skin diseases and the CF drug Kaftrio, which Milda’s parents in Klaipėda, Lithuania, would like to have reimbursed in order to prolong their daughter’s life. 

Urté Gyliené remembers the exact day when a genetic test revealed that Milda had CF. It was her own birthday, after which she just cried. She and her husband had been trying in vain to have a child for six years. Milda seemed to be a healthy baby in the first few months of her life – until she didn’t recover well from a coronavirus infection. The whole family was infected with Covid-19 in autumn 2020. Everyone soon recovered, but Milda didn’t stop coughing. Then came the diagnosis.

The congenital genetic defect only becomes a problem if a child happens to inherit the disease from both parents. The risk for Milda was one in four. “We were really unlucky,” says Urté Gyliené and quickly adds: “But of course we are still very lucky to have Milda.”

Theoretically, they could also buy Kaftrio for their daughter privately, with a doctor’s prescription from a pharmacy abroad. But they can’t afford that, even though Milda’s father works as a surgeon and her mother works for a marketing agency. It would cost 17,000 euros a month. And in Lithuania, people only earn about half as much as in Germany. Milda’s family has therefore already considered moving to another EU country where Kaftrio is reimbursed. “This is a progressive disease, it gets worse and worse over the years,” says her mother. “My greatest fear is that Milda will suffer and die in my arms.” 

Lithuania, with a population of around 2.8 million, has been part of the EU for ten years. Anyone travelling to this country can still sense a hint of the former Soviet Union, the wide streets, the many flag holders on the houses. The euro has been in force since 2015, which is reflected in the standard of living, for example in the BMWs and Porsches that drive along the cobbled streets of Klaipėda’s old town. But when it comes to access to medicines, the European Union is far, far away. 

When asked, Julijanas Gališanskis from the Lithuanian Ministry of Health confirmed that nine of the 32 drugs on the IQWiG list are missing in Lithuania. The Lithuanian government is currently negotiating the price of a small number of them with the pharmaceutical companies, for example Kaftrio, which Milda so urgently needs. For most of the missing drugs, the companies have not even submitted an application for reimbursement in Lithuania. 

Not only in Lithuania, but in many EU countries important medicines are missing, as research by SZ, NDR, WDR and Investigate Europe shows. According to the research, only in two EU countries, Germany and Austria, are all 32 medicines available. In the Baltic states, around ten are not available. Almost half are missing in Cyprus and as many as 25 are missing in Hungary, where patients in need can apply for reimbursement individually; 25,000 patients tried to do so in 2022. Every tenth application was rejected.

Monika Luty, 27, from Poland, has even changed her whole life for this reason. Like Milda Gyliené, she suffers from CF. Four years ago, her condition worsened dramatically, her lung capacity was only 20 per cent and the young woman weighed 23 kilograms at the time. Monika Luty posted a video online in which she pleaded with the manufacturer Vertex for Kaftrio, which was not available in Poland at the time. “Although I lived in the EU, I was discriminated against because I wasn’t German or of a different nationality,” she says.

With the help of her friends, Luty raised 200,000 euros via crowdfunding and her father sold his car. This enabled her to pay for Kaftrio herself. When she saw how much better she felt with this therapy, she moved to Frankfurt, worked in an office there and from then on received Kaftrio on prescription. “I cried because it was so easy,” she says. However, she also suffered from depression during the therapy, which is a known side effect of the drug. Luty now lives in Poland again, where CFTR modulators are now reimbursed. Would she have made it through the crucial years without Kaftrio? Monika Luty doesn’t know.

According to the research, in Romania alone, six highly effective cancer drugs that have been newly authorised in the EU since 2019 are either not reimbursed by the national health insurance fund or only reimbursed to a very limited extent, i.e. not for all types of cancer for which they have long been used in other countries – too expensive. The government in Bucharest has rejected the demand to double the drug budget, citing the national budget. 

Not everyone knows that you can sue the healthcare system

Bogdan Radu, who does not want to speak publicly about his illness under his real name, can tell us what this means. The businessman, 39, joins us via video from Romania. Radu, short beard, striped shirt, sits in an open-plan office, he travels a lot for work and is now able to do so again.

At the end of 2019, doctors diagnosed him with colon cancer. After surgery and chemotherapy, immunotherapy with the drug Keytruda would have significantly improved his chances. But while this antibody, which targets the body’s own immune cells against the cancer, is the best-selling drug in the world, Radu’s doctor was unable to prescribe it to him. And Radu could not afford the treatment privately; he would have had to pay 2,300 euros every three weeks for two years. 

In the summer of 2023, metastases appeared in his liver and Radu’s life was at risk. The engineer has two children, who are now eleven and four years old. “I wasn’t allowed to die,” he says, “I had to live at least another ten years to see my children grow up.” He seems surprisingly calm as he says this. “I’m an optimist, I always think there’s still an option.”

He hired a lawyer. Oncologist and head of Romania’s national cancer commission, Michael Schenker, says that more and more patients are taking their doctors to court to get the cost of prescribed drugs reimbursed by the national health insurance fund. In 2023 alone, more than a thousand cancer patients successfully went to court and the state had to provide them with the medication because it could demonstrably help them. Bogdan Radu also won.

He has been receiving Keytruda on prescription for a year now. The metastases have shrunk. Radu knows that his chances would have been better if he had been given the medication from the start, but he also knows that many Romanians don’t manage what he has achieved. You have to find the right lawyer and have the courage to fight not only against the disease, but also against the healthcare system. “I’m young, I work in an international company, I speak English, I know how to get information,” he says, “others can’t do that.”

However, the problem is not only that each EU country has to negotiate the price of important medicines itself, but also how this is done.

The pharmaceutical companies pressurise the negotiators of the national health authorities and health insurance funds to sign confidentiality agreements about the content of the discount contracts, known in industry jargon as “managed entry agreements” – meaning that the prices actually negotiated remain secret. Francis Arickx, Head of the Pharmaceutical Policy Directorate at the Belgian state health insurance organisation, gives a vivid description of how this works. “I have conducted a good hundred such negotiations,” he says. “I sat at the table with two colleagues opposite a delegation from the company in question with a whole team of lawyers. It feels threatening and is also somehow theatre.” 

This means that companies can grant large countries with many patients high discounts without the other countries finding out about it – and pay much more money. Or the large countries pay high prices because they can afford them – but these are unaffordable for poorer countries in the EU. 

In the case of Milda’s disease CF, France paid around 71,000 euros net per year for each patient treated with CFTR modulators in 2022, according to the research. In Italy it was 81,000 euros, in the Netherlands 88,000 euros. This is significantly less than the healthcare systems in Poland (112,000 euros) and the Czech Republic (140,000 euros), for example, had to pay in 2022. Even if taxes are possibly included in the Eastern European prices, the price is immense compared to the richer Western European countries. Due to the secrecy between manufacturers and national health authorities, the extent of the disparity in Europe was not previously known. 

Germany is the only country that makes the reimbursement price public: After deducting VAT and a statutory discount of twelve per cent, which the manufacturers have to pay, a Kaftrio patient cost the health insurance funds around 156,000 euros in 2022. This sum is also confirmed by the AOK Federal Association. 

On request, Vertex states that the price estimates for the countries mentioned are “incorrect”, but the manufacturer itself does not want to name any prices. In general, the company states: “Reimbursement prices are not set unilaterally by the manufacturer, but are agreed confidentially with the health authorities in each country.” They are based on “their innovation and the value they bring to the cystic fibrosis community, carers and healthcare systems”. In addition, the revenue from such medicines “funds our ongoing research into other serious diseases”.

Illustration: Alexia Barakou

Pharmacist Martin Hug knows all about the burdens of the healthcare system – and those of patients. He manages the pharmacy at the University Medical Centre in Freiburg and has two daughters with CF himself. 

Hug welcomes us to his flat in a Freiburg suburb for an interview. Since he became head of the hospital pharmacy twelve years ago, the cost of medicines has more than quadrupled, while the number of prescriptions has only risen slightly, says Hug. 

Although he was surprised by the development, he does not believe in “demonising the pharmaceutical industry”, as he calls it. Without their innovations, many patients would be worse off. New drugs for rare diseases in particular may be expensive, but they are life-changing. Emphasising this is important to him, and when he talks about it, he leans forward on the wooden table in his living room as if to push his words. 

Like Milda in Lithuania, Hug’s daughters were also diagnosed with cystic fibrosis as babies; both would probably not have reached adulthood according to the medical standards of the time. They have now been adults for a long time and are living well with the disease. Family photos and colourful drawings hang on the wall in Hug’s flat, where he himself grew up. 

The younger of the two daughters, Maria Hug, sits opposite her father and watches him closely as he talks about the medical details that she knows only too well. She is 27, wears a striped jumper and large round glasses and is currently doing her Master’s degree in cultural studies. 

She has been taking Kaftrio for one and a half years and its predecessor Kalydeco for more than ten years. Today, both medications are usually prescribed together, one is taken in the morning, the other in the evening, because they complement each other in their mode of action. 

Back in the 1990s, the average life expectancy for cystic fibrosis sufferers increased slightly almost every year – even without new medication. Back then, the father remembers, it was said that you could even live to be thirty with cystic fibrosis. But since the company Vertex launched its CFTR modulators on the market, the curve has been rising steeply. In Germany, the life expectancy for CF patients is now 60 years.

Maria Hug has already gone through some “difficult phases” with her illness. Her lungs were so damaged that she would have needed a lung transplant sooner or later without the new medication – the only question is whether she would have received a donor organ in time. And this treatment would also have been expensive, Martin Hug points out. This is often the case with new drugs whose prices seem fantastic at first: you always have to consider how much money would be saved elsewhere. 

Maria Hug used to have severe coughing fits every few minutes. She still keeps a mug on her bedside table to get rid of the phlegm at night. Back then, it was always full in the morning, but now it’s just a dust catcher. “If I work on myself now, do sport and eat right, I actually get fitter and don’t just stay the same,” says Maria Hug and smiles. Her everyday life is no longer determined by the illness: “Suddenly your life is in front of you.”

She has been very lucky, she says, lucky to have two pharmacist parents who know their stuff. And lucky to live in a country where new medicines are reimbursed by the health insurance: “A huge privilege.”

Sharp criticism of planned changes to the law in Germany

This is due to the very special role that Germany plays in the complicated structure of authorisation and pricing on the European pharmaceutical market. Unlike everywhere else in the EU, German legislation guarantees pharmaceutical manufacturers that the statutory health insurance funds initially purchase every drug authorised by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) at the manufacturer’s list price. Only after one year do the experts at IQWiG in Cologne examine on behalf of the health insurance funds whether an additional medical benefit can actually be proven for the drugs. If this is the case, the health insurance funds negotiate the value of the additional benefit with the manufacturers – and a possible discount from the so-called list price demanded up to that point. In the event of a dispute, an arbitration board with equal representation decides, as the law in Germany requires that patients can obtain such effective medicines on prescription in any case. In the end, patients pay – even if the price is very high.

Only if the alleged innovation does not offer any major additional benefit, i.e. it is possibly only a sham innovation, does the price automatically fall to 90 per cent of the price of the comparable therapy. 

Germany also has another special feature compared to other EU countries: The final negotiated price that the health insurance funds pay for a medicine, the so-called reimbursement amount, can be viewed by experts. This should help doctors and hospitals to act economically. And for the other states, the prices they have learnt from Germany so far have been a kind of upper limit for their own negotiations with pharmaceutical manufacturers. 

But that could change soon. 

This is because the German government is currently planning to join the “secret prices” that are common in the EU. The pharmaceutical industry lobby has been pushing for this for a long time. However, seven years ago, when the former health minister Hermann Gröhe from the CDU wanted to overturn transparency in the grand coalition, an SPD health politician named Karl Lauterbach said: “We are living in a time when we need more transparency because both doctors and patients have a right to know the prices of prescribed medicines.” 

Illustration: Alexia Barakou

Today, Lauterbach himself is Minister of Health, and apparently he has had a change of heart. He receives the research team for an interview at the ministry in Berlin. Back then, Lauterbach says, he had hoped “that other countries would publicise the price like we did”, but that didn’t happen. That is why he is now also in favour of secret prices. The minister hopes that this will lead to higher discounts, as the prices for medicines in Germany are currently higher than in any other comparable country. Lauterbach believes that the pharmaceutical industry in Germany, despite its large market, gives so few discounts on its medicines so that other countries do not demand similarly high discounts with reference to Germany. “But we can’t be the paymaster for everyone else,” he says. 

Josef Hecken (CDU) was once Minister of Health in Saarland, but that was a long time ago. Today, he is chairman of the Federal Joint Committee, which decides on the entitlements of people with statutory health insurance. Like the health insurance companies and many doctors’ associations, Hecken, 64, does not have a good word to say about the plans of the traffic light government to maintain secrecy. There is “no economic rationale” for this, he says in an interview with the research team. If nobody knows the prices for new medicines, doctors can no longer prescribe economically because they don’t know which new medicine is the cheaper one, says Hecken. The discounts that Lauterbach is hoping for are in any case “a groundless promise for which there is no evidence”. And they would be immediately cancelled out by the disadvantages of secret pricing.

Former Cypriot Health Minister George Pamboridis says that the secret contracts enable “the industry to abuse its position of power over its customers, the states”. The pharmaceutical companies would play the EU countries off against each other “by locking us in separate rooms”. A small country like Cyprus is being put at a particular disadvantage. When he was a minister, he learnt on the quiet that his health insurance fund “paid double, triple or even five times the prices of other countries”. If medicines are marketed in Cyprus at all: Only in Malta and Hungary are even fewer new medicines regularly available.

In its response to the research team’s enquiry, the Kaftrio manufacturer Vertex also admits that one of several factors in price negotiations with countries is “a country’s ability to finance innovative medicines”. So you have to be able to afford it. 

Milda has now had enough of her vibrating waistcoat in the large living/dining room of the terraced house in Klaipėda. It’s only been 20 minutes when she says she has to go to the toilet. Urté Gyliené is stung by this, she wants to do everything as well as possible, to protect her daughter’s lungs as much as possible. Nevertheless, she cancels the procedure, knowing that she mustn’t put too much pressure on Milda so that she can do well again tomorrow.

Urté Gyliené is fighting with all her might to ensure that her daughter receives Kaftrio before her lungs are so scarred that Milda can barely breathe. She is involved in the self-help organisation “Right to Breathe”, an international association of CF sufferers from all over the world. A few months ago, they travelled to the Vertex headquarters in Boston, released black balloons into the sky and distributed dollars stained with red paint in the reception hall. How many more billions do you need, they asked. What are our children’s lives worth? 

Patients outside the EU also have to fight to be provided with the best available medicines. In the post-Brexit UK, an online petition is underway to prevent the state healthcare system there from removing Kaftrio from the list of reimbursable preparations as planned in order to save money.

The production costs of Kaftrio are only 4 per cent of the sales price. In 2023, Vertex spent around 400 million US dollars to produce the drugs, which the company then sold for 9.8 billion dollars. If Kaftrio were sold for 5,600 dollars per year per patient, it would still be profitable, according to calculations by pharmacologist Andrew Hill from the University of Liverpool, a consultant to the World Health Organisation (WHO). He finds it “outrageous” that the pharmaceutical company negotiates so doggedly over prices and “lets children die” in the process. But Vertex has a monopoly, “so a country only has the choice of buying the drug at the Vertex price or getting nothing, so the children suffer”. 

If the EU acted as a community, corporations would not be able to threaten individual countries

Companies often argue that research costs are high, and by no means every drug is a success. When asked, Vertex (most recent annual turnover of around 10 billion dollars, net profit of 3.6 billion dollars) states that it has invested more than 70 per cent of its operating costs in research and development over the past ten years, with a total of 10 billion dollars being invested in cystic fibrosis research alone. When asked, Vertex also described the stated production costs as “inaccurate”. 

Illustration: Alexia Barakou

In the case of the CFTR modulators, the initial research apparently did not even come from Vertex itself. Rather, the American Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, a non-profit organisation, raised money and used it to support a small biotech company called Aurora. A year later, in 2001, Vertex bought Aurora. “First the taxpayers pay for the invention of new therapeutic approaches, but then we force the inventors to obtain the capital for further commercial development from a kind of mafia that demands extreme returns,” says Anja Schiel, who helps decide the value and reimbursement of new drugs for the regulatory authority in Norway. 

Vertex, on the other hand, states that “all of our approved cystic fibrosis drugs were discovered and developed by Vertex in Vertex laboratories”.

A number of companies are clearly not interested in making their drugs widely available, as the analyses by SZ, NDR, WDR and Investigate Europe show. For example, the cancer drug Breyanzi from the US pharmaceutical company Bristol Myers Squibb is not available in 17 of the 25 countries analysed, tumour patients in 13 EU countries are waiting in vain for the cancer drug Empliciti from the same company, and the breast cancer drug Talzena from Pfizer, of which a pack of 30 tablets costs 1800 euros, is not available to patients in twelve EU countries.

A spokesperson for the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (Efpia) said in response to an enquiry that there is a “consensus that prices should be based on a country’s ability to pay”. The “reasons for unavailability and delays” are “slow regulatory procedures” and “delays in reimbursement of a new medicine and local decisions by healthcare providers”. When “prices are higher” than “perceived value or affordability”, there is “inevitably a delay in negotiating the price.” 

The solution would be obvious: the EU could, like a real community, negotiate the prices for medicines protected from competition by patents centrally for the entire EU. It would have the market power with its 450 million inhabitants in mostly successful economies, and during the coronavirus pandemic, the EU has done exactly that when procuring vaccines. Until now, pharmaceutical companies have always been able to threaten individual countries with not supplying them if their health authorities do not pay the prices demanded. But the pharmaceutical industry could not afford to stop selling its medicines in the world’s largest single market altogether. 

Urté Gyliené hopes that her daughter will not have to rely solely on the power of the shaking waistcoat in future. The negotiations between the Lithuanian authorities and Vertex could soon be finalised, in which case Milda would also have the chance to get Kaftrio. Her mother says: “Every child in Europe equally deserves a long and happy life.”

*

Editor’s note: Investigate Europe is a non-profit co-operative of journalists from eleven countries who research together and publish the results throughout Europe. Investigate Europe is financially supported by foundations, private donors and readers. These include: Adessium Foundation, Fritt Ord, GLS Treuhand, IJ4EU, Journalismfund Europe, Open Society Foundation, Reva & David Logan Foundation, Rudolf Augstein Foundation, Schöpflin Foundation, Hübner & Kennedy Foundation.

In addition to SZ, WDR and NDR, the Standard in Austria, EU Observer and Alternative Economiques in Belgium, Investigace in the Czech Republic, Eesti Ekspress in Estonia, YLE in Finland, Mediapart and ARTE in France, Reporters United in Greece also report on research into pharmaceutical prices, Partizán in Hungary, The Journal in Ireland, Il Fatto Quotidiano in Italy, Klassekampen in Norway, Delfi in Latvia, 15 min in Lithuania, Gazeta Wyborcza in Poland, RTP in Portugal, Snoop in Romania, Investigative Centre of Jan Kuciak in Slovakia, InfoLibre in Spain and Open Democracy in the UK.

Additional Credits:

  • Wojcech Cieśla (Reporter Investigate Europe, Poland)
  • Attila Kálmán (Reporter Investigate Europe, Hungary)
  • Amund Trellevik (Reporter Investigate Europe, Norway)
  • Sarmīte Gaidule (Reporter, Delfi, Latvia)
  • Veli-Pekka Hämäläinen (Reporter Yle, Finland)
  • Ida Mažutaitienė (Reporter 15min, Lithuania)
  • Bettina Pfluger (Reporter, Standard, Austria)
  • Catrien Spijkerman (Reporter, Trouw, Netherland)
  • Palina Milling (Reporter, WDR, Germany)
  • Leonard Scharffenberg (Reporter, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Germany)
  • Zuzana Sotova(Reporter, Investigace.cz, Czech Republic)
  • Eva Štefanková (Reporter, ICJK, Slovakia)
  • Luke Taylor (Author, British Medical Journal)
  • Chris Matthews – Editing (Investigate Europe)
  • Ralf Wiegand – Editing (Süddeutsche Zeitung)
  • Alexia Barakou – Illustrations/Animation

A full list of all articles published under this investigation can be found on the groups’ Laureate page.