Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna are making combined profits of $93.5million daily from their highly successful Covid-19 vaccines while the world’s poorest countries remain largely unvaccinated, according to a new analysis.
It was gathered the three firms were making $65,000 every minute and have sold the vast majority of their doses to countries like United States, United Kingdom, South African, Brazil, Russia, Nigeria, Egypt among others, leaving low-income nations in the lurch.
COVID-19 hit the world at the twilight of 2019 but its devastating impact was felt in 2020 with several dead and businesses closing up across the globe.
The adverse effects on human, the global evonomy and the need to keep the world safe pushed the Pharma companies to go into vaccine production to curb the spread.
Currently, no company is making the vaccines in Nigeria with 206 million population despite the presence of Pfizer in the country.
According to the People’s Vaccine Alliance (PVA), a coalition campaigning for wider access to Covid vaccines, which based its calculations on the firms’ own earning reports, it was learnt that the trio would make pre-tax profits of $34 billion this year between them, which works out to over $1,000 a second, $65,000 a minute or $93.5 million a day.
African Alliance and People’s Vaccine Alliance Africa, Maaza Seyoum noted that It was obscene that just a few companies were making millions of dollars in profit every single hour, while just two per cent of people in low-income countries had been fully vaccinated against coronavirus, adding that Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna had used their monopolies to prioritise the most profitable contracts with the richest governments, leaving low-income countries out in the cold.
Pfizer and BioNTech have delivered less than one per cent of their total supplies to low-income countries while Moderna has delivered just 0.2 percent, the PVA report further said.
Currently, it said that 98 per cent of people in low-income countries had not been fully vaccinated.
The three companies’ actions were in contrast to AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson, which provided their vaccines on a not-for-profit basis, though both had announced they foresee ending this arrangement in the future as the pandemic winds down.
PVA explained that despite receiving public funding of more than $8 billion, Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna had refused calls to transfer vaccine technology to producers in low- and middle-income countries via the World Health Organisation (WHO), a move that could increase global supply, drive down prices and save millions of lives.
It noted: “In Moderna’s case, this is despite explicit pressure from the White House and requests from the WHO that the company collaborate in and help accelerate its plan to replicate the Moderna vaccine for wider production at its mRNA hub in South Africa.”
“While Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla has dismissed technology transfer as “dangerous nonsense,” the WHO’s decision to grant emergency use approval to the Indian-developed Covaxin earlier this month proves that developing countries have the capacity and expertise.”
More than 100 nations, including the United States, back that move, but it is being blocked by rich countries including the UK and Germany..
(Inside Business Online)
