14 ms·
>At $3 to $4, many countries will jump on board ASAP and stay away from the expensive vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna. The price difference will likely remain
by ddeck 6y ago
>At $3 to $4, many countries will jump on board ASAP and stay away from the expensive vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna.
The price difference will likely remain substantial, but in case anyone is unaware, the difference is currently greater due to AstraZeneca pledging to the sell the vaccine at cost "during the pandemic", while Pfizer and Moderna have indicated that they fully intend to profit. [1]
Once AstraZeneca deem the pandemic to be over, the price will likely rise.
It was reported a few months ago that internal AstraZeneca documents showed them projecting the "Pandemic Period" to end on 1 July 2021. [2]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/21/health/covid-19-vaccine-coronavirus-moderna-pfizer.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/21/health/covid-19-vaccine-c...
[2] https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/520202-astrazenecas-no-profit-pledge-for-vaccine-has-expiration-date-report https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/520202-astrazenecas-no...
- bleepblorp 6y agoAny government that fails to vacate the relevant patents and mass produce the vaccines at-cost will have failed its citizens. Allowing Pharma shareholders to profiteer from this disaster is completely unacceptable. Pay them their costs and not one cent more.
- postingawayonhn 6y agoI don't see why they shouldn't be able to make a fair profit.
- alephu5 6y agoWhen things go the other way, society doesn't let them make a fair loss.
- evandijk70 6y agoThere are currently 54 vaccines being tested on humans. Getting the necessary data to obtain approval for human testing requires a lot of funding. Testing on humans requires a lot of funding. In the end, maybe 4 vaccines will be used. Do you think the companies that produced and tested the ~50 vaccines that will not be used will get their investment back?
- PunchTornado 6y agoyes, all of these vaccine research are funded by the taxpayer.
- bobcostas55 6y ago[citation needed]
- madaxe_again 6y agoI don’t see why it’s any different to war profiteering. Legal, yes - moral, debatable.
- HPsquared 6y agoExcept for how, you know, weapons and medicines have slightly different effects when used.
- guipsp 6y agoWell, only to the extent that you distinguish killing someone via weapons and just letting them die via preventable disease.
- dri_ft 6y agoWith weapons, it costs money to kill someone; with medicine, it costs money to save them.
- guipsp 6y agoOnly to the extent that you don't value human life. If you value human life, then you'll see that both have costs associated.
- dash2 6y agoThis isn't responding to the OP's point, which was that war profiteering (making money by providing weapons to kill people) is morally different from selling vaccines (making money by providing medicines to save people's lives).
- guipsp 6y agoI'm not sure I follow? Profiteering off of healthcare has a cost, in terms of people not cared for due to various market reasons.
- pizza234 6y agoPharmaceutical corporations are not exactly well known to seek "fair" profits. Practically speaking, I suppose a hypothetical scenario could be that the: - the companies are granted patents - the vaccine lasts for a limited amount of time - before each patent expiry they companies make minor modifications (say, storage temperature requirement decreased by half a degree) - the company make "unfair" profits by extending the oligopoly for a very long amount of time I'm not stating that this will happen, but on the other hand, I find this plausible.
- drran 6y agoIt looks like a huge opportunity! Start your own pharmaceutical company and disrupt these bastards! You found the problem, now bring the solution.
- guipsp 6y agoUnfortunately, this area has a very high start up cost, which limits disruption. This is the big problem when people say "just disrupt". In addition, the aforementioned patents prevent disruption. Even long after the original patent expires.
- tcptomato 6y agowhat's you definition of fair? What the market would bear?
- erikstarck 6y agoWill you then also pay those who put huge effort and expense in to research that was perhaps necessary but didn't lead anywhere?
- Laakeri 6y agoMost research is government funded
- vixen99 6y agoI.e., tax payer funded either directly or via debt servicing.
- mensetmanusman 6y agoResearch broadly fits into two categories, basic research and research with near to midterm industrial viability. Most basic research is government funded.
- refurb 6y agoNo, it's not. Private R&D spending is at least doouble that of the gov't. Look up the budget of the NIH and compare it with the R&D budget of big pharma.
- aquadrop 6y agoIs there somewhere any numbers on how much exactly does it cost? What portion is really "research" and what portion is marketing budget? How much trial phase 1/2/3 cost etc?
- Scandiravian 6y agoWhen I studied pharmaceutical sciences ten years ago, the rule-of-thumb was that it cost around 1 billion dollars from idea to the product being launched. That's only r&d costs and regulations have become stricter over the years, so I imagine the cost has risen since then
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- mytailorisrich 6y agoI agree that in cases of overwhelming national interests patents and licensing should be ignored if they stand in the way. But: this is not a medicine made of a molecule that can be synthesised by the chemical industry. Such a vaccine requires input from the creator and then specialist equipment to manufacture. Poor countries don't have the infrastructure to manufacture and the creator labs are not going to tell you how to produce the vaccine just because you ask them. In any case, governments should pressure labs to enforce an low prove.
- usrusr 6y agoIn the context of the vaccination rush I often wonder how military aircraft procurement was doing it when extreme r&d progress and extreme mass production were coinciding during ww2. New types were developed by companies (even the Soviets maintained a healthy competition between design bureaus) but once a type was established and in volume demand it apparently was manufactured wherever a production line could be adapted. Was that just free market subcontracting in the US or did DoD design bids come with something like a premeditated licensing option baked in from the beginning?
- mytailorisrich 6y agoI think that the "free market" stopped to operate during that time. The whole economy was redirected to the war effort and everyone with it. These programs were federally-funded with the goal to produce as much as possible. For production I'm sure that factories were financially compensated for the work.
- refurb 6y agoI’m sure you’d be willing to play that game? Let’s say your job becomes “essential”. The company pays your costs (rent, food) and nothing more. I mean, to “profit” is unacceptable.
- guipsp 6y agoI'm sure you realize that the rights of corporations are not the rights of the individual. I'm also sure that you realize the difference between taking a small profit, and the huge margins big pharma companies have. In addition, the pharma companies have already been compensated with massive grants.
- andi999 6y agoThe biontech vaccine is not from big pharma.
- steerablesafe 6y agoThat would be a great way to disincentivize vaccine research for the next major pandemic.
- WalterBright 6y ago> Pay them their costs and not one cent more. I prefer a system where it's very worthwhile for people to risk a lot and work hard to save my life. If it was all about altruism, I doubt a vaccine would be developed for many more years.
- anoncake 6y agoYou don't even need altruism. Vaccine researchers want the pandemic to end like everyone else plus they're interested in vaccine research anyway.
- andi999 6y agoBiontech didnt do vaccine. They pivoted because they saw a big opportunity using their approach might lead to a vaccine for Covid. So to justifies this pivot (and get the investments into the company) there need to be a possibility of big profit at the horizon.
- usrusr 6y agoHere comes my old publicly traded corporation rant: a company with a well defined owner, even with a well defined group of owners, would, given the opportunity, profit handsomely. But not overdo it. They'd rather be seen as a global saviour, not as a global ransomer. Enter public trading: the opportunity alone for global ransoming will inevitably become the projection that defines the street price for shares and once valuation is up there ransom-level profits would suddenly appear not excessive but appropriate, given the level of paper investments of the latest, valuation-defining round of buyers.
- ericmay 6y agoI don’t think this is a very good rant. Private companies have investors too, and board leadership varies from company to company.
- bigmanwalter 6y ago
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- em500 6y agoAnd in the next pandemic, be shocked - shocked, that a new vaccine takes 10 years instead of 1 to appear...
- SanderNL 6y agoWhile off-putting, these same capitalist forces are what made companies like Pfizer possible in the first place. Where are the socialist factories? I do not see any communist, religious and/or otherwise motivated groups of people producing anything of value right now. Lots of noise, very little substance.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tssva 6y agoAnd when the next pandemic hits no drug company will develop, manufacture and distribute a vaccine because they know there is no profit to be had.
- bumby 6y agoWhile I think the current system helps, let's not pretend that profit is the sole reason people decide to work in medicine or research. We all have things (and people) in our lives who are probably a net negative in terms of financial outcome, but we enjoy them anyways because our value systems are more complex than just "maximize profit"
- BurningFrog 6y agoI think it should always be insanely profitable to save the world! That is something we want to encourage!
- Ericson2314 6y agoWe should have drug bounties for that, rather than trying to make up R&D costs with per-dose price gouging. This ensures equitable access, ...you know, that the whole world is actually saved.
- BurningFrog 6y agoYeah, I'm sure there are better possible systems, but in the imperfect 2020 real world, things work the way they work. In reality, these costs are microscopical compared to the cost of the Covid recession, and all the "stimulus packages" across the planet. I assume most governments will pay the cost of vaccines, or even pay people to take the shots. The US says it will.
- trentnix 6y agoA profit opportunity requiring significant investment has led to fast and fantastic results that will benefit us all. But you want to punish the opportunists who've absorbed significant risk to bring us those results because you've decided their motivation isn't sufficiently pure. I pray anyone of like mind is never in a position to enact such progress-killing madness and fear terribly that government is already full of them. And besides, it is mind-numbingly complicated to calculate "at-cost" because as others have pointed out, that includes all of the dead-end R&D, ongoing legal exposure, interest on the loans used to cashflow operations at pharmaceutical giants, appropriate licensing of existing intellectual property that these vaccines are built on, and the million other ways money is spent to develop pharmaceuticals.
- flexie 6y ago"due to AstraZeneca pledging to the sell the vaccine at cost "during the pandemic", while Pfizer and Moderna have indicated that they fully intend to profit." - Sort of sums up the difference between European and American approach to healthcare.
- ddeck 6y agoTo be fair, Johnson & Johnson (a US company) also made a similar pledge to AstraZeneca. These two companies have collectively received more than $1.5 billion from the US government [1]. As I understand it, Pfizer have not taken any federal funding. They do have government purchase agreements, but they are dependent on Pfizer delivering a viable vaccine. Their partner BioNTech received German government funding: Berlin gave the German company $445 million in an agreement in September to help accelerate the vaccine by building out manufacturing and development capacity in its home market. [2] [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/21/health/coronavirus-vaccine-astrazeneca.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/21/health/coronavirus-vaccin... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-09/pfizer-vaccine-s-funding-came-from-berlin-not-washington https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-09/pfizer-va...
- flexie 6y agoYes, the German/Turkish company that actually developed the Pfizer vaccine is heavily subsidized. For me it's mostly how it all ends up (simplified): European healthcare: Affordable, available to all and workable. Bad PR. American: Expensive, inaccessible except to the rich, and only slightly better. Great PR. The AstraZeneca vaccine also has 90 percent efficacy when used twice.
- MagnumOpus 6y ago> The AstraZeneca vaccine also has 90 percent efficacy when used twice No it doesn't. Both dosings use two shots, and the "90%" number from the smaller dosing is from an unreliably small sample set of 33 infections -- it could easily be 70-80% by next month when more data comes in.
- howlgarnish 6y agoNo, the main driver for the price difference is that this is a "traditional" vaccine produced using existing technology, while Pfizer/Moderna are newfangled mRNA ones. Also, all 3 have made various noises about not making a profit etc, it's quite hard to sort out the marketing from what will actually happen at this point. Oxford/Astra have committed to supplying at least 100M doses to low-income countries for under $3 though.