Modern will quintuple the price of its Covid shot to match its rival Pfizer“, can reveal DailyMail.com.
CEO Stephane Bancel said the cost of Moderna’s Covid vaccine will ‘rise a bit’ to be set in the ‘same ballpark’ as Pfizer’s when it continues the open market this year.
Americans can expect to pay around $130 for Moderna’s vaccine, which is estimated to cost just $1.18 to manufacture, representing a markup of 10,000%. The vaccine is currently sold for around $26 per dose.
Moderna – which made an estimated profit of $39 billion last year – benefited from a multi-billion dollar taxpayer-funded support package to design and test its Covid vaccine as part of Operation Warp Speed of the Trump administration.
Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel has revealed his company will raise the price of its Covid vaccine five times to match rival Pfizer’s offer of $110-130 per vaccine
Mr Bancel told DailyMail.com: “It’s [the price] increase a bit because the previous price was massively reduced…we got help from the US government.
“When we made the first contract with the United States, we offered them an offer [with] a big discount.
He added: “In the US it’s now $26. It was the reduced price, it will go up. Pfizer said it would sell it for $110 to $130.
“We would like to be in the same ballpark as that.”
Pfizer was heavily criticized upon its release announced in October plans to raise the price of his hit to $130 later this year.
Moderna had previously considered increasing the commercial price to between $82 and $100 per dose.
Mr. Bancel appeared at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas on Saturday, where he spoke with Jefferson Health President Dr. Stephen Klasko about Moderna’s joint venture with pharmaceutical giant Merck to create personalized vaccines. against cancer.
Covid vaccines have been free for Americans regardless of their insurance status during the pandemic.
This is thanks to Operation Warp Speed, which was enacted in the early weeks of the pandemic to speed up the development of Covid vaccines and treatments.
The Trump administration has shelled out more than $12 billion to biotech companies, including Moderna, Janssen and Novavax, to squeeze the timeline for a viable vaccine.
Moderna, a Massachusetts-based biotech startup, signed multiple contracts with the federal government totaling more than $2.4 billion in the first year of the pandemic.
In July 2022, the US government awarded a $1.74 billion deal to secure over 65 million additional doses of Covid from Moderna.
vaccine, bringing the total number of shots procured to more than 560 million.
When those run out, negotiating the cost of vaccines will soon fall to insurance companies and private purchasers — absent the federal government buying extra doses at a reasonable price.
Subsidized injections have so far been free to all Americans, whether or not they have health insurance. And while insured Americans likely won’t see a difference when they go for the shot, those without coverage will face a hefty price tag.
Insurance premiums will cover the price hike, which means Americans won’t actually pay out of pocket, but it will still raise premiums.
A recent Kaiser family foundation analysis premium filings from 2023 showed that some insurers expect the commercialization of vaccines to drive up premium costs across the board. And these costs could continue to put upward pressure on premiums for years to come.
Mr Bancel’s comments confirmed lawmakers’ fears that Pfizer’s price hike could prompt other Covid shot makers to raise their prices as well.
Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Representative-elect Peter Welch of Vermont accuses Pfizer of “improper profit” and “pure and deadly greed” in a scathing letter to its CEO Albert Bourla last month, and urged him to change course.
Unlike Moderna, Pfizer and its partner company BioNTech have not accepted federal money to fuel covid vaccine research and development. Still, that’s not to say Pfizer hasn’t received support from the US government.
Mr Bancel, whose net worth is $5.7 billion, told DailyMail.com that Moderna’s Covid vaccines would be priced the same as rival vaccine maker Pfizer
Pfizer-BioNTech had signed a two billion dollar deal with the government early on to supply 100 million doses of its vaccine when it was cleared by the Food and Drug Administration.
The Trump administration proceeded to purchase millions more doses in the months that followed.
Moderna was expected to raise between $18 billion and $19 billion each of the past two years from Covid vaccine contracts, a massive increase from 2020 when it brought in $803 million.
Meanwhile, its competitor Pfizer was expected to generate more than $100 billion in revenue last year and $81.2 billion in 2021. Those numbers nicely offset the $40 billion a year it earned in previous years.
The Biden administration’s Covid funding is running out. Congress has blocked requests at the White House for increased federal funds for new vaccines, research and development, treatments and testing supplies.
The federal government has spent a staggering $30 billion on Covid vaccines since the first ones became available in late December 2020, purchasing a total of 1.2 billion doses of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines combined.
This total includes the cost of development and mass production of the bivalent vaccines that target the original and omicron strains of Covid. These boosters, however, were met with less than stellar enthusiasm.
Fewer than 14% of eligible Americans five and older received a bivalent booster, compared to 73% who followed the original two-shot regimen.
Public health authorities have struggled to rally support around the latest booster shot as the population grows increasingly fatigued with all things Covid.
The Biden administration has stepped up efforts to encourage apathetic Americans to get the booster, announcing a six-week blitz in November aimed at ‘reaching the elderly and communities hardest hit by Covid by making vaccination more convenient and by increasing awareness through paid media payments.
It comes after Pfizer predicted up to $15 billion in annual revenue by 2030 from its snaps.
Mr. Bancel made the comments at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas on Saturday, where he discussed them Moderna’s joint venture with pharmaceutical giant Merck to create personalized cancer vaccines.
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