PHARMA GIANTS CHARGE GOVERNMENTS 5 TIMES REAL PRICE OF COVID VACCINES

Fri 30 July 2021:

Vaccinating the world against COVID-19 might be at least five times cheaper if pharmaceutical corporations didn’t profit from their COVID-19 vaccine monopolies, according to campaigners from The People’s Vaccine Alliance.

According to a new analysis by the Alliance, Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna are charging governments up to $41 billion more than the anticipated cost of manufacture. Colombia, for example, may have overpaid for its doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines by as much as $375 million compared to the estimated cost price.

Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna have sold over 90 percent of their vaccines so far to rich countries, charging up to 24 times the potential cost of production, according to campaigners.

Pfizer/BioNTech announced last week that it would license a South African firm to fill and package 100 million doses for use in Africa, although this is a drop in the ocean compared to the demand. Neither corporation has undertaken to fully transfer vaccine technology and know-how to any capable producers in underdeveloped nations, which might boost global supply, drive down prices, and save millions of lives.

Although the infection and death rates due to COVID-19 implications are rapidly growing in developing countries, the pharma giants have sold more than 90% of their COVID-19 vaccines to rich countries which overpay them as far as 24 times the actual price, the alliance went on.

Developing countries have low vaccination rates and the situation is getting worse, as the infections especially from COVID-19 Delta variant are rising. The inequalities become more obvious when statistics come into perspective. In the EU at the moment 57.8% of the population is vaccinated with at least one dose of the vaccine, according to European Center for Disease Prevention and Control. In the US this percentage is 56.8%, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. At the same time in very big developing countries with hundreds of millions of population those percentages are in single digits.

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