The Biden administration is going to stop providing Covid vaccines for free—and Big Pharma is ready to profit from the change.
by Jake Johnson, In These Times
The Massachusetts-based pharmaceutical giant Moderna faced angry backlash on Tuesday following the CEO’s announcement that the firm is considering pricing its Covid-19 vaccine somewhere between $100 and $130 per dose in the U.S.
The upper end of that range, according to the People’s Vaccine Alliance (PVA), would represent a 4,000% markup above the cost of manufacturing the shot, which experts have pegged at roughly $2.85 per dose.
“The sheer greed is obscene,” said PVA policy co-lead Julia Kosgei, who stressed that “billions of taxpayer dollars went into the development of mRNA vaccines.”
“This vaccine isn’t just Moderna’s, it was developed in collaboration with a government agency based on decades of publicly-funded research,” Kosgei said. “It is the people’s vaccine — and it should be available and affordable for everyone, everywhere.”
Stephane Bancel, Moderna’s billionaire CEO, defended the proposed price range in an interview on the sidelines of the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, telling The Wall Street Journal that he believes “this type of pricing is consistent with the value” of the vaccine.
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