The profits generated by large biotech companies during the pandemic amounted to several billion dollars. Author: Pennsylvania
The U.S.-declared public health emergency over the COVID-19 pandemic is coming to an end, and government coverage of COVID-19 vaccines made by pharmaceutical giants Pfizer and Moderna is ending.
Beginning in May, Americans will have to pay for every dose of the drug, and while the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions will have hearings on vaccine prices on March 22, it is already known that the $15 the government pays for every dose of Pfizer and $31 Moderna when they come out of the pocket of each person or health insurance companies, both companies offered multiplied prices: $110 and $130 respectively.
The inevitable question arises: is this a “fair price” or speculative? When both consortiums used public funds or through pre-purchase agreements (PPAs), public funding was provided by taxpayers who actually paid every last penny for vaccine research, development and production, covering the financial risks of any failure and guaranteeing the market if they were successful. as a result.
Pharmaceutical companies, usually among the most profitable consortiums in the world, are known to have gotten rich off the pandemic. The Netherlands-based SOMO Research Center for Multinational Enterprises has released a profit report for four of the seven private companies it researched in 2021 and 2022: $90 billion.
These are the two mentioned, besides BioNTech and Sinovac. Only Pfizer added $35 billion and Moderna added $20 billion.
Taxpayers will now have to buy new doses at very high prices, which is a shameless profit-seeking by consortiums, as SOMO described it. Europeans and other countries in the “developed” environment will also have to pay for increased profits. These are their favorite markets, the ones that, in the midst of a deadly disease, have monopolized vaccines, despite the fact that they have not yet reached a large part of the world’s population, of course, the poor and underdeveloped.
A shameful disparity that many experts say has prolonged the pandemic because not everyone was vaccinated at the same time, and this has opened the door to new strains or variants of SARS-CoV-2, some much more deadly and others more easily spread.
Despite several countries asking for a suspension of intellectual property rights or patents on vaccines during the pandemic, this has not been achieved, and pharmaceutical companies have become significantly richer during these three disastrous years.
However, the reality is that as the pandemic subsides, the need for vaccines among the population is also decreasing.
In the United States, even a tiny fraction of its residents rejected prevention and care measures to prevent the spread of the pandemic, and another resisted the life-saving injection, hence the disrespectful award for first place in the number of people with confirmed coronavirus. : 103,647,093, deaths: 1,122,217.
Marketing was the premise of these oligopolies, which only see through the prism of how much they earn, not how much they save. If they didn’t have a secure buying market, with profit margins making them have more and more in their bank accounts, they might even stop producing what should have been primarily a public good rather than a business.
Source: Juventud Rebelde