Pfizer and ModernManufacturers of the two most popular vaccines used in the United States and much of the rest of the world expect to bring in $ 51 billion in vaccine sales this year, according to profit reports released by the companies.
Pfizer expects to be the leader, with expected sales of $ 32 billion, with Moderna forecasting revenue of $ 19 billion from its Covid photos.
Almost all of these sales come from the developed world, with large nations like the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and others have a surplus of vaccines, while many developing countries are struggling to get vaccines.
The great discrepancy between the developing and the developed world has been noted by organizations such as World Health Organization (WHO) and the People’s Alliance for Vaccines (PVA), which continue to call on companies to make their vaccines more widely available in the developing world.
Pfizer and Moderna plan to combine $ 51 billion in revenue from their Covid vaccines this year
Major vaccine manufacturers have been criticized by the global health community for prioritizing health benefits. Companies have delivered less than 2% of vaccines to developing countries, while refusing to lift IP waivers to allow those countries to make their own versions of the vaccine
The Pfizer and Moderna shots have been used more than 500 million times in the United States since they first became available in late 2020.
The Pfizer injection has been given 326 million times to fully vaccinate 123 million Americans and stimulate 52 million others, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The CDC also reports that the Moderna vaccine has been given 208 million times to fully vaccinate 41 million people.
Moderna CEO Stefan Bansel (pictured) predicts that Covid booster vaccines will be needed this fall, possibly another unexpected financial result for the pharmaceutical giant
Both companies have big plans for 2022, with more vaccine products on the way and predict an unforeseen financial outcome, with some experts saying annual booster vaccines may take more than a decade to control Covid in the long run.
Moderna and Pfizer, which partner with German company BioNTech to develop and manufacture vaccines against Covid and share the profits, both have a Omicron-specific vaccine that is expected to be available in the coming weeks.
Moderna CEO Stefan Bansel said in February that his company believes another boost in Covid will be needed in the autumn, which should only add to the company’s revenue forecasts for the future.
“We believe we are more likely to move to an endemic environment,” Bansel said Squawk Box on CNBC in February.
“We still have to be careful, because as we saw with Delta, which came after the alpha and was more virulent,” [it] it is always possible to get the more virulent option, of course.
Endemic would mean that people can live with the virus without disrupting normal life. Like the flu, it will also require annual booster vaccines, which will likely be produced by Pfizer and Moderna.
Albert Burla, Pfizer’s chief executive, said he believed regular, annual boosters would be needed for at least the next ten years.
Although the pharmaceutical company’s vaccines have certainly been profitable and the effectiveness of the vaccines has probably saved millions of lives around the world, the way they did business during the pandemic has not gone unnoticed.
The WHO has called for greater equity in vaccines around the world, as many developing nations, especially in Africa, have had problems delivering the vaccine to their populations.
While in countries like America, the vaccine is widely available to anyone who wants it – and millions of doses are even thrown away due to lack of demand – in Africa only 19 percent of people have received at least one injection of COVID-19 vaccine and 12 percent have fully vaccinated.
Some African countries still have vaccination rates below five percent.
Burla said this was not due to a lack of access to vaccines, but instead to the vacillations about vaccines that exist in those nations.
Alex Maitland, a senior adviser to Oxfam, a UK-based non-profit anti-poverty organization and a member of PVA, a global alliance of organizations dedicated to fighting what they describe as “vaccine apartheid”, told the DailyMail. com that these allegations are twofold.
Despite claims by Burla and even President Biden, Africans in general have higher levels of vaccine intake than in the United States, with 67% to 89% of people in each country wanting the strike.
Pfizer CEO Albert Burla (right) and President Joe Biden (left) have previously said vaccine use remains limited in Africa due to fluctuations in vaccines across countries. Studies show that demand for vaccines is as high in African countries as in the United States
The main problem cited by Maitland is the lack of access to staff. He notes that only one percent of Pfizer’s total vaccine shipments and 1.4 percent of Moderna have gone to the developing world.
Instead, companies have given priority to the constant sale of ammunition strikes in the developed world, where profit margins are much higher.
Meanwhile, companies such as AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson are licensing their staff to produce in the developed world.
“Other companies that produce this vaccine do not show this [profit] desire, “Maitland said.
He also notes that Moderna has taken $ 2.5 billion in funding from the US government for research and development spending, so there must be a greater obligation to bring humanity back.
The PVA is calling for the abolition of patent waivers, allowing developing countries to produce generic versions of the shot.
These measures are supported by most countries around the world, although key leaders such as the United States and the United Kingdom maintain the exemptions.
“There has been a lot of lobbying,” Maitland said, citing pressure from companies themselves on governments to refuse to back down on vaccine patents.
He said these larger, richer countries also benefit financially from these vaccine sales.
BioNTech, for example, was responsible for 0.5 percent from Germany’s economic growth in 2021, a marker that Maitland calls “unprecedented.”
This is great for the German economy, and continued protection will strengthen the United States – where Pfizer and Moderna are based – and Germany at the expense of others.
The main disadvantage of the lack of fairness of vaccines has been solved by the developed world.
The lack of vaccines in the developing world allows the virus to continue to spread indefinitely.
Every time Covid finds a new host, it replicates quickly. Every time it replicates, it has a chance to mutate.
While most mutations have little or no effect, mutations are sometimes combined to create a new variant with new traits.
The rapid spread of the virus poses a threat to people everywhere, as a variant that is formed in one country can quickly spread around the world.
The last two strains are ahead of America, where Delta and Omicron. The first originated in India when the nation was hit by a huge leap in the spring of 2021. The latter was first discovered in South Africa, but its true origin is unknown.
Both caused huge spikes in Covid in America despite a relatively high vaccination rate, and Omicron was even able to evade vaccine protection.
Maitland said developed nations are simply “crossing the line” by launching booster vaccines to prevent options once they arrive, instead of providing vaccines to the developing world to prevent all of these new options.
While these richer nations can pay more money, they will be able to receive booster vaccines even before poorer nations receive enough doses to give their populations the original vaccine sequence.
This leaves much poorer nations in a situation where they are blocked, with little access to human resources, while the developing world does not help them.
The United States has promised to donate more than 1.1 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccine to developing countries, but advocacy groups such as Doctors Without Borders have said that such donations are not enough and that developing nations should be allowed to develop their own. own versions of the shots.
“The United States must help dramatically increase mRNA vaccine production worldwide – through the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 mRNA technology transfer center in South Africa – by requiring pharmaceutical corporations to share technology and know-how for mRNA vaccines, so many more manufacturers around the world can produce these life-saving vaccines, “said Dr Carrie Thatcher, director of the Doctors Without Borders program.