Pfizer and the #COVID19 Vaccine: Greed Kills
The world has literally entered a race against COVID19 in which the most important factor is time. The speed with which we vaccinate the world will depend on the success or failure of this, which is the most important battle of humanity in modern times.
At the current rate of vaccination, it would take 5.8 years to immunize the world against COVID19. This slowness in vaccination worldwide is favoring the appearance of new variants of the virus, which would unnecessarily lengthen the pandemic.
The lengthening of the pandemic –which could last for years or perhaps decades– would represent thousands or millions of deaths more (which could be avoided); as well as even greater damage to economies, loss of employment, and increased poverty.
In this scenario of unnecessary lengthening of the pandemic, the biggest beneficiaries are pharmaceutical companies. Although the development of vaccines was financed mostly by public money, pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer insist on a business vision above the public good of humanity. Let’s see.
In the case of Pfizer, the company expects to obtain $33.5 billion in revenue from the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine in 2021 (Business Wire, 2021), with only ~ $ 1 billion invested in its research and development.
By the end of 2020, Pfizer forecasts $15 billion in revenue in 2021 from the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine (Business Wire, 2021b). This figure was updated for the first quarter of 2021 to $26 billion dollars (Business Wire, 2021) and has been revised again in mid-2021 to $33.5 billion, where it calculates the revenue margin at a “high 20%” according to its website (Pfizer, 2021).
This is USD $33.5 billion x 0.27 (as a conservative percentage of the “high 20%” mentioned in the NYSE Report), which would represent USD $9.45 billion of net profit.
Put more simply, if you consider that Pfizer invested only USD $1 billion, its percentage of profitability from the COVID-19 vaccine will be 904% during 2021 alone.
This figure is likely to be exceeded based on the increasing trend and considering current trials of the vaccine in children 6 months to 11 years, as well as a booster trial of a third dose (Pfizer, 2021).
Although Pfizer refused to use public funds from the US government, its partner BioNTech received 800 million public funds (Global Health Center, 2021), which means that the development of the vaccine was at least 30% successful thanks to public funding.
Averaging $39 for the two doses, Pfizer’s vaccine is the most expensive of the more than 10 widely used COVID-19 vaccines in the world.
For this reason, activists from 30 civil organizations participated in a global day of protest in front of Pfizer offices in New York, Mexico, India, Panama, and Argentina.
AHF at a global level leads the Vaccinate Our World campaign, which calls for, among other points, the temporary release of patents for # COVID19 Vaccines, intentional cooperation, greater transparency, the expansion of the scope of the Global Fund to respond to the SARS-CoV2 pandemic and the realization of a New Global Public Health Convention.
Learn more about the initiative at: https://vaccinateourworld.org/