Big pharmaceutical companies “bullied” South Africa into signing unfair agreements that forced the country to overpay for COVID-19 vaccines compared with Western nations, according to a nonprofit that lobbied for the details to be released.

The details were revealed on Tuesday in an analysis by the Health Justice Initiative (HJI), a South African NGO campaigning against public health inequality after it won a court bid last month to get the government to release its contracts.

During the height of the pandemic, Johnson & Johnson (J&J) charged South Africa 15 percent more per dose of its COVID vaccine than it charged the European Union, while Pfizer-BioNTech charged South Africa nearly 33 percent more than it reportedly charged the African Union, according to vaccine contracts between the pharmaceutical companies and the government.