> Moderna said it would charge other governments from $32 to $37 per dose. The charge to the United States, which has already committed about $2.5 billion to help develop Moderna’s vaccine and buy doses, comes out to about $24.80 a shot
Yes, they're expecting to profit to some degree, but those charges don't look to be particularly out of line for a newer vaccine from a quick skim of price data.
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I can't see how any developed country would choose to pass on it at that cost if available to them while others are still under development/not available in sufficient supply.
The economic damage this is causing is massive and anything that gets you past this even slightly faster is more than worth that price.
You could vaccinate the whole UK population for $2.3bn (in medication costs). The pandemic is causing vastly more economic damage than that to the UK.
Through only August, COVID has cost just the UK government (to say nothing of other economic damage) over $277bn (@current exchange rates). The vaccine could cost half, it could cost 5x as much, but it would still be absurd to do anything other than pay it and get it out to as much of your population as you can if it's available to distribute and other vaccines aren't.
Even if you've got something else in the works, if buying what you can of this gets you "reopened/normal" a month or two earlier than not, it's still an obvious economic win for any developed country.
This is already a $10+ trillion pandemic in terms of economic destruction (we'll see economic damage spread out for more than a decade, so the final tally will be even higher). The vaccines are a couple billion dollars each, including manufacturing at scale. A lot of drugs now cost that to bring to market and don't have a small fraction of the positive impact on humanity.
If all that existed were market forces, Moderna and Pfizer could charge ten times what they are. They obviously knew the extreme blowback they'd suffer if they did that (including likely nationalization of their vaccines).
$20-$30 per dose in affluent nations is absurdly cheap to end this nightmare. That's a couple order-out pizzas.
It doesn't seem to be rich vs poor countries in this case. The Moderna vaccine is expensive. Too expensive, even for some developed countries that rejected it as an option.
If the US government is happy to hand out billions in funding and then pay a high price for the doses, why would a private company not take advantage of this?
Somehow the EU/UK convinced AstraZeneca to sell the Oxford vaccine at production cost.
The $100M/vaccine price is stupid, but I would easily pay $1000 to get the vaccine early and raise money for factories. With just 20M doses it would mean $10B income for Moderna.
>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]
> If the US government is happy to hand out billions in funding and then pay a high price for the doses, why would a private company not take advantage of this?
The US government paid Moderna $1B to fund the development and $1.5B for 100 million doses. They are paying Pfizer $1.9B for 100 million doses of their vaccine. I don't consider $25/dose (maximum) or $19/dose to be "a high price".
I think Moderna is concerned about having its entire synthesis, mass manufacture, and delivery mechanism given away for free. This isn't just about the Covid vaccine, this is their entire business that the WHO wants access to.
It'd be one thing if the vaccine was an isolated innovation like a single piece of software that could be given away, but this is the company itself and everything they've been building. It's like the WHO is asking for the entire monorepo and instructions to set up the entire platform.
Also, once the WHO has the tech, it'll go into the hands of competing firms in Russia and China.
Maybe the WHO should be paying Moderna for more vaccines and asking for them to be provided at-cost?
I don't really know how to determine a fair price other than letting them compete with Moderna et al.
Traditional flu jabs apparently [0] cost the NHS £5-8 (<$11) per dose; the Astrazeneca Covid-19 vaccine seems in-line with that charging $2-5 non-profit for the duration of the pandemic [1]. But I don't know how comparable that is to Pfizer's given that the latter's different, newer (mRNA) tech AIUI? (Perhaps that's a disservice to the researchers at AZ/Oxford, I don't know.)
Your comment is just fanning the flames with no interesting discussion for the audience. When a counter point is presented, you're moving goal posts.
Moderna is selling vaccines for $20/pop. That's a US company.
Vaccines are also purchased by the Governments usually to be distributed for free. In US, you can get a COVID-vaccine shot for free anywhere in any state.
the cost of these vaccines is largely hidden, no? Each country made deals behind closed doors AFAIK. I've seen some estimates of $12-$30 a shot, but have no idea the validity of this.
How much do the treatments cost? Is it vastly different?
I don't think we need to replace vaccines, but large swathes of the population still don't have access. It seems very likely that a multi-modal approach would allow us to treat more people, faster.
I think most of the companies are selling the vaccine quite cheaply.
Moderna and Pfizer are asking for 15-20 $ / person for vaccine that has value of thousands of euros.
Which, as Eliezer notes, is part of the problem. That together with flexible delivery schedules in agreements mean that companies have little extra resources and incentives to invest in fast vaccine production.
The government was paying just Pfizer like 50bn a year for Covid vaccines, I’m sure if you add up all the manufacturers they were easily paying 100bn a year from 2021-2023. I don’t have all the math but I am guessing it ended up costing at least $500/yr to vaccinate a person.
That is a long ways from free, there is just the bit of abstraction that allows corporations to rob us blind. If we had to go get $500 out of an ATM and hand it to the pharmacy everyone would have been throwing a fit. Bundle it in with the taxes that get silently pulled from your paycheck before you even get it though? No biggie.
> Moderna will price their drug as high as they can to recoup losses incurred during the pandemic
That statement implies that they haven't been paid market price for their vaccine during the pandemic. Vaccines were not provided for free by any manufacturer. They were selling doses to governments as fast as they could be made making billions in the process. Pfizer is projecting $26 billion to $33.5 billion in COVID-19 vaccine revenue this year. Moderna is projecting $15 billion to $30 billion in 2022 COVID-19 vaccine revenue.
That's not entirely fair. The other view: Oxford University pairs with a company with the global logistics and manufacturing capability to create billions of vaccine in record time. I much prefer the idea of a royalty-free vaccine open to all, but I also understand the more practical route of working with a company if it means faster delivery where time is of the essence.
The article posted here purposefully omits the cost price of the Oxford vaccine which is approximately £3 ($5). Even if AstraZeneca were to add a profit margin of a few dollars to the cost price (e.g. bring the cost to $10) that would still be cheaper than the vaccines from Biotech/Pfizer and Moderna.
Also, Oxford has always insited that they wanted to create a vaccine that would be as cheap as possible to manufacture so it would be affordable to treat people around the world.
Also, we won't really conquer covid until everyone has built up immunity and the countries with the lowest vaccination rates are the ones that can't afford this kind of markup.
This is still a problem that affects us all. Not saying that it would be less bad if it didn't affect us, but I mean that a hard-fought vaccine for a niche illness could have to be expensive to amortize development costs. Covid is not that.
Ps and like @Beltalowda says a lot of their R&D was publicly funded. And they got a huge boost by bringing their thus far experimental RNA vaccine tech into the mainstream.
“ AstraZeneca, which has pledged it won’t make a profit on the vaccine during the pandemic, has reached agreements with governments and international health organizations that put its price at about $2.50 a dose. Pfizer’s vaccine costs about $20 a dose, while Moderna’s is $15 to $25, based on agreements the companies have struck to supply their vaccines to the U.S. government.”
And:
“ The vaccine can be transported under “normal refrigerated conditions” of 2 to 8 degrees Celsius (36 to 46 degrees Fahrenheit), AstraZeneca said. By comparison, Pfizer plans to distribute its vaccine using specially designed “thermal shippers” that use dry ice to maintain temperatures of minus-70 degrees Celsius (minus-94 degrees Fahrenheit).”
Another huge differentiator is price. At $3 to $4, many countries will jump on board ASAP and stay away from the expensive vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna.
> Moderna said it would charge other governments from $32 to $37 per dose. The charge to the United States, which has already committed about $2.5 billion to help develop Moderna’s vaccine and buy doses, comes out to about $24.80 a shot
Yes, they're expecting to profit to some degree, but those charges don't look to be particularly out of line for a newer vaccine from a quick skim of price data.
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I can't see how any developed country would choose to pass on it at that cost if available to them while others are still under development/not available in sufficient supply.
The economic damage this is causing is massive and anything that gets you past this even slightly faster is more than worth that price.
You could vaccinate the whole UK population for $2.3bn (in medication costs). The pandemic is causing vastly more economic damage than that to the UK.
Through only August, COVID has cost just the UK government (to say nothing of other economic damage) over $277bn (@current exchange rates). The vaccine could cost half, it could cost 5x as much, but it would still be absurd to do anything other than pay it and get it out to as much of your population as you can if it's available to distribute and other vaccines aren't.
Even if you've got something else in the works, if buying what you can of this gets you "reopened/normal" a month or two earlier than not, it's still an obvious economic win for any developed country.
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Source:
Vaccine pricing - Table 6 - https://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0009/284832/...
Moderna pricing - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/16/health/Covid-moderna-vacc...
Economic cost - https://www.bbc.com/news/business-52663523
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