Pfizer, Moderna seen reaping billions from Covid-19 vaccine booster market | Hacker News Reader

Pfizer, Moderna seen reaping billions from Covid-19 vaccine booster market

reuters.com

What I don’t understand is how we can shut down the economy with a huge impact on small businesses, but not force the drug manufactures to share the capability with the rest of the world. We complain about the unvaccinated in the US and the possibility of mutations, but then don’t do everything we can to help vaccinate the world and prevent mutations. And Russia and China are sharing the less effective vaccines they developed.[1] The whole things seems tragic, hypocritical, and an inevitable blow to America abroad.

1. https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/bidens-failure-on-covid-v...

Capitalism doesn't work that way for health. It's only too predictable now.

To be fair, the vaccines we have today were literally the first ones out of the gate, and they should be considered a stopgap solution that only serves to mitigate the problems caused by the global pandemic, but they patently don't work in eliminating it or even reach herd immunity.

Basically the current batch of vaccines (the best ones, to boot) just train the immune system for it to have a fighting chance at not being overwhelmed by covid. But that's it.

Some vaccination locations even make it their point to distribute pamphlets stating quite clear that the vaccine is not a silver bullet, and all basic health and higiene precautions in place should continue to be followed.

It's far too early to talk about preventing mutations or any scenario where the current vaccines making covid is a thing of the past. If anything, the economical gains from the vaccines illustrate that much needs to be done to get a better, long-term solution.

Forcing vaccine manufacturers to give away their vaccine creates strong incentives against inventing vaccines.

It works once, but the next pandemic may happen without any vaccines.

The consensual, win-win way is to buy vaccines from the manufacturers, at high prices. This makes manufacturers wealthy by making people healthy and aligns incentives for the common good.

Or just have government funded researchers that are well compensated, it's not the actual scientist that developed the drugs getting rich.

First, the science in developing a vaccine is not the only work involved. Clinical trials and scaling up manufacturing to name a few.

Second, it actually is the scientists getting rich at least in some cases: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/10/business/biontech-covid-v...

Here is a profile of the billionaire inventors of the Pfizer vaccine as a counterexample:

https://www.businessinsider.com/a-billionaire-couple-is-behi...

I was going to say the the same thing, just have both, well educated, funded scientists working for the Government (funded but still independent) and private companies competing with them too.

Huh? The Moderna employees have made out very well based on equity appreciation. And Pfizer scientists are well compensated including stock.

That’s a straw man argument. They’ve made billions and will make billions more. Nothing is being given away for free. But currently, it is in their financial interests for this pandemic to go on indefinitely with continued mutations and a never-ending need for boosters. And our free market always seems to tilt in favor of monopolies. Shut down small businesses but don’t put any pressure on big pharma. Similar to 2008, let average people suffer but prop up the banks. I believe in free markets, but there is a reason people are turning against capitalism. No markets are truly free and we need consistent values applied to players big and small. Helping the world get vaccinated is the morally right thing to do, not optimizing pharma profits for the next decade under the guise of “incentives.”

Please forgive my personal pet peeve, but nothing BurningFrog said was a straw man as far as i can tell. I don't see any way they misrepresented your argument.

“Giving away their vaccine” is the straw man. There is a huge range between free and maximum profits. I’m not arguing that they shouldn’t be incentivized with a profit, the question is how much and what's in the best interest of the American people, not just Pfizer and Moderna.

Do you think the ~$20/dose Pfizer and Moderna are charging is unreasonable?

For poor people in India or Africa - yes.

At $20/dose you can vaccinate all of humanity twice for $300B. An incredible bargain.

The US government has spent $5300B in pandemic relief packages. Vaccinating the planet could have been a cheap PR win barely noticed among that.

Except there just isn't production capacity for that on the planet.

https://www.pgpf.org/blog/2021/03/heres-everything-congress-...

> Except there just isn't production capacity for that on the planet.

But it's not like we're fully utilizing the available production capacity.

https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economic-issues-watch/do...

I was responding to this, written by someone else:

> force the drug manufactures to share the capability with the rest of the world

This reads like a copy/paste of the usual comments on HN about big tech, but almost none of it actually applies to most vaccine manufacturers.

So does that mean they would have not done anything unless they got paid? They would have just let people die? This is one of the many factors that doesn't add up when telling people they have a civic duty, yet the large corporations can't be held accountable and also make a huge profit.

There are some less than amazing ideologies present in the US. Property and money are valued above human life by many.

Government could have easily forced a reasonable license where the original manufacturer gets paid per shot but is not in a position to limit availability. They are not the only ones able to manufacture these vaccines.

For the mRNA vaccines, I think they actually are.

Only experimental batches had ever been made before, and then they had to invent ways to make billions of doses.

Wait, i thought this is what we negotiated when the initial development and payment for the vaccine happened?!

There is some movement in this area. While this is not absolute it at lease a reversal on the US's previous stance of protecting patents on the vaccine.

> Covid: US backs waiver on vaccine patents to boost supply - 06 May 2021

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57004302

As I recall, this move needs further agreement between the US and its allies.

$60 billion for two years worth of shots? Sounds like a steal. Covid has cost the global economy Trillions and Trillions of dollars already, and all the downstream costs will probably add up to $100 trillion real dollars when factoring in inflation, money printing, national debt, state/provincial debts/local debts/consumer debt increases.

The costs of the pandemic are one side. The other is the cost of developing and producing the vaccines. In a normal market situation, prices are determined by supply and demand. But that's really not such a situation here. The question from the government's point of view has to be whether you could have had the vaccine cheaper. After all, large sums of money have already been invested by the states for research and development. The question is what the contracts and conditions were for these investments. But if the manufacturers had hardly any costs and risks during development and are now allowed to hold the rights to the patents and make large profits with the vaccines, then in my opinion something has gone wrong. However, I don't know if that is actually the case here.

> In a normal market situation, prices are determined by supply and demand. But that's really not such a situation here.

Isn't it exactly the situation here?

I mean, a few months ago we even had central governments bid against their own local governments to have access to vaccines. Doesn't that lay out quite clearly that this is a demand-driven market?

The market is not normal because countries have invested massive sums of money into these companies without acquiring shares in return, so I just hope they have negotiated other terms to get the vaccines at fair prices.

> The market is not normal because countries have invested massive sums of money into these companies without acquiring shares in return (...)

I don't believe this is a fair or accurate description of what really happens.

Countries invest in education and free and open research, countries invest in entrepreneurship and in people launching startups, and countries invest in partnerships between their public research and private companies to foster the creation of added-value products and services.

And in the end those companies pay taxes back to the state, which in Europe (where BioNTech is from) is higher than 20%.

Furthermore, your comment has nothing at all to do with markets. You're trying to pin onto the "market" tag one of the most basic characteristics of social democratic societies, where the state invests in infrastructure and in lowering or eliminating barriers to entry in business.

> And in the end those companies pay taxes back to the state, which in Europe (where BioNTech is from) is higher than 20%.

Every company needs to do that. If a government invests in a company then maybe they should also pay a HIGHER tax rate?

The initial thesis was that governments get nothing in return from their investment in education and research. This is patently false. Companies pay taxes, and the higher income they make, the more taxes they pay.

You may argue that over 20% in income tax is not enough, but in the case of BioNTech and Pfizer, you're arguing between two scenarios: seeing the states get about 20% from the profit extracted from billions in revenue, or getting zero due to the absence of any investment in education and basic research and supporting research projects.

Getting paid a 20% chunk of a multi-billion euro revenue is not small change, and this also ignores the fact that this prior investment in education and research shared with startups, which mind you supported the bulk of the development cost of these vaccines and thus enabled humanity to have vaccines with such a low turn-around time, was what ultimately allowed the world to start seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. How valuable is that?

Not to mention the externalities in fostering the creation of industries and high-value tech jobs.

Vaccine manufacturers are making $20-25/dose in revenue, not profit.

The price for vaccines currently being charged is absurdly reasonable. I would pay 10x the price out of pocket without a second thought, and I wouldn't care how much of that is profit for the manufacturer.

Around $20 for the incredibly new mrna based vaccines. Other versions, like oxford-astrazeneca, are single digit USD per dose. As I recall ISI has set a price ceiling of about $4/dose there.

These vaccines are so stupidly cheap and cost effective that the priority is, has been, and will be simply manufacturing and distributing enough.

> The question from the government's point of view has to be whether you could have had the vaccine cheaper.

The answer to this is emphatically no.

Countries that paid more per-dose got vaccines earlier. Manufactures are producing vaccines as fast as they can, but there's still unfilled demand for over 5 billion more doses. And in low-income countries which can't afford to pay as much, even today only 1.1% of the population has been vaccinated so far...

> there's still unfilled demand for over 5 billion more doses.

Because US and Europe can pay that much more the Big Pharma is going to make the 3rd, 4th,... booster shots instead of trying to satisfy that low-income countries demand. And making new vaccine against delta seems also less profitable than just pushing the booster shots. Immunity falling in 6 months - sounds like a situation somewhat between subscription model and 12 hours Vicodin, you can be sure that the MBAs know how to exploit it.

What happens around covid is well outside just the supposed medical issue of pandemic fighting. If anything it is seems to be primarily about business and politics. For example US officially pressured Brazil to not take Russian vaccine https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/03/16/hhs-brazil-s... .

> In a normal market situation, prices are determined by supply and demand.

Indeed supply is severely limited (esp. Outside rich countries, but even inside rich countries if you go back a few months) and demand is extreme.

If this was a free market situation, pfizer would have much much more money.

A good example is Singapore. Total direct costs of support for business and individuals? $60B from what I’ve seen. And that does not include the economic costs of shutting down the economy.

Cost to vaccinate everyone in the country? ~$250-500M for the vaccines alone.

The vaccines are an absolute steal at their current price..

I actually have no problem with pharma companies seeing huge profits from the covid vaccines.

Should they not be compensated for their extremely difficult/impactful work? Why won’t someone else do it for cheaper?

Regulatory capture and patent laws are pretty big inhibitors to competing with massive pharmaceutical companies generally speaking.

And the insider-friendly FDA process.

Big phrama and their lobbyists will have more money now to influence policy.

That money will be largely going to executives and shareholders, people who had very little hand in the science.

I'm fine with that if it happens in a free market under informed consent and for curing real diseases. But big pharma, big media, big tech, government and law enforcement acting in complete lockstep to forcibly inject experimental vaccines into your veins for something that amounts to a bad variant of the flu is something else entirely.

Did you ever have the flu? I bet you didn't and if you think you did, you probably had a cold instead. A runny nose, headaches, and a sore throat doesn't mean you got the flu.

The flu will bind you to your bed for at least a week and you will need 3-6 weeks to recover. You will feel like somebody ran you over with a truck. It's not fun, it's highly dangerous.

Why do people always says this?

I've had the flu, I'm sure nearly everyone has had it once. It's not really incredibly uncommon.

People do tend to conflate all sorts of "coughs" together as the "flu", including many illnesses that are a lot more mild than the flu.

> People do tend to conflate all sorts of "coughs" together as the "flu", including many illnesses that are a lot more mild than the flu.

People do, but if you look at CDC estimates, tens of millions of people get influenza in any given year, so it's fairly like that any given adult individual has contracted influenza multiple times in their life.

Disease Burden of Influenza: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html

FWIW, I've had the flu (confirmed with nasal swab). I was bound to bed for 2-3 days, with fever spikes above 41°C but it didn't take several weeks to recover. Barely a few days.

> The flu will bind you to your bed for at least a week and you will need 3-6 weeks to recover.

It can, but this isn't a given. Tens of millions of people get influenza yearly in the USA, and there's a wide range of estimates of asymptomatic cases, with 50% being a reasonable baseline to work from.

See, e.g. Seasonal Incidence of Symptomatic Influenza in the United States: https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/66/10/1511/4682599

> Estimates of the percentage of influenza infections that are asymptomatic include a common approximation of 50% [33], 33% in 1 review [34] and 4%–28%, 0–100%, and 65%–85% in another review [35]. Both asymptomatic and symptomatic infections are captured in serological studies. The commonly cited “5%–20%” figure came from a serological study [5], and so represents both symptomatic and asymptomatic disease among a mix of vaccinated and unvaccinated persons. If 50% of influenza were symptomatic, this would correspond to “2.5%–10%” with symptomatic disease, which is very similar to the range that we report.

Yes. For one example Finland has a nasal inhalation vaccine and cannot get funding to go ahead with it. (my partner is Finnish).

There are about 30 different vaccines for COVID-19 around the world. Only the most "luxurious ones" such as Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and AstraZeneca are nucleic acid vaccines which use mRNA or DNA. It's a "superior" technology because it costs less and our own bodies do the work so to speak. Viruses or subunits of viruses don't have to be synthesized in a lab, so the challenges which come with that don't have to be dealt with.

I'm pretty sure that this is the future of vaccines anyway.

I wish the government worked so well, and could carry out a plan with such a diverse group of corporations without discord. Sadly a fantasy.

I'd want to move to that world, even if the government was nefarious. At least they're super competent.

I don’t think government, tech, and law enforcement are acting in complete lockstep. But I can believe they are acting out of fear, and fueled by social media and technology.

This worries me even more than a conspiracy, because people who are acting out of fear cannot consistently do good science or make rational decisions. When every government official, media outlet, and society at large is depending on scientists, doctors, and businesses to “fix” the pandemic so we can get back to business as usual, how strong are the incentive to cut corners or fudge some numbers if the ends justify the means? IMHO we are building lots of terrible incentive structures that are bound to blow up in our face.

Okay.. experimental vaccines?

There are about 30 different COVID-19 vaccines around the world, with all kinds of different technology. There are inactivated vaccines, live-attenuated vaccines, viral vector vaccines, you name it. And then there are also nucleic acid vaccines, which deliver instructions to our cells, either as DNA or as mRNA. These aren't new, and they have been researched way before COVID-19. It's just that these vaccines save costs and time, which makes them good option for this pandemic. Do note that in less rich and developed countries, more of the other types of vaccines are being used. It's actually a luxury that we can have this type of vaccine and personally I am quite sure that this is the future of most vaccines anyway.

> I actually have no problem with pharma companies seeing huge profits from the covid vaccines.

Not that long ago people were talking about how the for-profit medical industry didn't have the best interest of the people in mind because their priority was to make money, to the detriment of people who can't afford healthcare. Now that seems to have vanished and all of a sudden they are able to still make profit while at the same time get massive public funding.

Sure, that criticism might apply generally and previously - but i don't think its applying all that much to covid vaccines.

If they had taken the risks and incurred the costs of development themselves, of course. But they were massively subsidized. In that case, the state should either get a share of the profits or negotiate fair prices that exclude all too huge profits.

Where should the line be?

For creating a vaccine which solves a global pandemic I think the rewards should be pretty steep. 60 billion is peanuts on the global scale. Millions of lives have been saved.

Yeah, a global pandemic will do that to the Pharma industry. I hope to see that money being put to good use developing new methods of delivering medicine and to novel uses of mRNA technology.

Is it just me or are Reuters headlines more clickbaity from a decade ago

They just recently changed to a limited paywall model.

And saving tens or hundreds of thousands of lives...

There's tons of money to be made interpreting Pharaoh's dreams too, until the year the crops go bad.

I don't know if their claim of extra protection is valid or valid to the claimed extent, but if so, it's well deserved and this is BS news.

And if it were easy, everyone would be doing it

It's interesting that the system working as intended is now viewed as a negative.

Is this not capitalism at work? Company provides what society needs. Right now only 2 companies provide this particular type of vaccine. More competition will come in, driving down costs.

Good. They've created massive value.

I'm sure there's no malignment of interests between these corps & taxpayers..

Taxpayers want to avoid dying and these corporations want to sell them a vaccine to achieve that. Seems like a nearly perfect alignment of interests to me

That is by no means a fair exchange. You'll do anything to save your life.

Anything in this case is spending about 40 USD per head. That seems incredibly cheap?

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