BioNTech/Pfizer sought 54.08 Euro per vaccine dose from EU (de)
tagesschau.de
tagesschau.de
I am still surprised most people around the world, inclusive of those in purchasing and procurement, fail to understand the time and value proposition in the equation. Entrepreneur or Business man tends to be far better at it.
In Germany that opportunity cost after 3 months of lockdown is huge.
How is this not just an obvious example of profiteering? Yeah they made something valuable, they should be rewarded, but also people are dying.
Plus they are going to be making money from this for YEARS. No-one thinks Covid can be eradicated, we're going to be buying an annual vaccine from these companies for the foreseeable future - this is why AstraZeneca were happy making no profit now - they know they'll make some money eventually.
Also another thing to bear in mind - one of the purposes of their new RNA vaccine tech was to make vaccines CHEAPER.
https://www.translatetheweb.com/?from=&to=en&dl=de&ref=trb&a...
If you prefer Google Translate:
https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=auto&tl=en&u=h...
Production and deployment ramp-ups contributed more to the issue (approval delay didn't help, surely!). Per absolute number of vaccines deployed the EU is behind the US and China. https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToS...
Profit yes, but paying that much for something that had not proven itself yet, no way.
It wouldn't be 18B, it would be 48B (2 doses per person for all inhabitants - though ok maybe you don't need to vaccinate children)
We are in a state of war..This is no game.We have ordered hundreds of millions of people to suspend their lives and hundreds of thousands are dying.
We're in the middle of a three month period of it being illegal for anyone to visit my home...
So maybe not the greatest value for money in a lifetime as there are plenty of much cheaper things with better returns, but at this scale of cost you're probably right.
Would it have been outrageous pandemic profiteering? Also yes.
The first price you get is high, specially if the thing in question has never been done before.
When things have never been done before, real prices at the end tend to be higher than expected.
Bureaucrats can expect things to be perfect, because they live in a perfect world of the already known. But when you work with uncertainty and chaos like spaceX new rockets or RNA vaccines you don't really know everything and need to fail in order to explore.
So far, RNA vaccines have been a tremendous success, they are faster and cheaper to produce, but they have never been used on humans before, and never before vaccination has been applied at such global scale.
As a German, I'd have happily paid 50€ or 100x more to receive a vaccination as soon as possible.
And then as a country, I'd be happy to pay that price too as it'd allow me to profit long-term by opening my economy that has been suffering from the crysis.
The EU has messed up vaccinations and now there needs to be consequences. Why do we even allow governments to handle the distribution of such a rare good when we all know they're too incompetent to do so? Markets exist for a reason.
But nobody has taken anyone for hostage. You're speculating. And it's a gigantic global health crysis. Nothing bad with pharma solving covid.
And, I would suggest more broadly that profit doesn’t equate with “morally good”. One could argue that under utilitarianism, the ethically “right” thing to do is to give away vaccines, or at least charge only the manufacturing price. Hell, even a dollar per vaccine across even 50% of the world’s population is a ton of money.
Single people think they know better than this genius swarm intelligence that is the market. And then they make stupid rules for everyone.
It doesn't matter what is good or bad. Right or wrong. Only the outcome matters. And arguably given the content of the original post, the outcome right now with politics is bad.
Have a look at the harm that fossil fuels can do simply because the costs of these damages were not priced into the cost of fossil fuels.
Markets are not magic. They're just a tool.
"Markets" themselves are the easy part. Regulating them properly is the really difficult part.
The truth is pharma companies had them over a barrel and took advantage of it. For all these years scientists were alerting politicians and the public in general the risk of a pandemic was very real and demanded more attention and resources but were not heard, and now that it came to pass countries do not have any other choice but to pay twice; for the development and for the product.
So sure, in an ideal world, with a population that respected science and not belittled scientists, better prepared countries would have had the advantage to negotiate better pricing because they would have been expecting it. Sadly we do not live in that world.
But the funding of the previous 10 years was 1.5B, from private people who also took way more risk.
The consumer surplus on vaccines is so incredibly large that it's all just a silly discussion. Pfizer making $40 of profit (or whatever) on a vaccine worth thousands of dollars just isn't interesting.
Higher prices make it harder for lower income countries, but you are claiming it's offensive that they would capture any of the value of the product, even in places where the 'high' price is not an issue.
Edit: Also, let's not kid ourselves here. Anyone that is a billionaire can surely get vacinated already easily.
In this case, i don't understand the rage when the USA was selling Epipen at 1000$.
Now I concur that letting Ursula von der Leyen convey this important decision with a veil of secrecy on the contract was not the best idea.