Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Senator-elect Peter Welch (D-Vt.) this week sent a scathing letter to Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla about the company’s plan to lower the price of its COVID-19 vaccines by 400 percent next month. year when it enters the commercial market.
“We urge you to refrain from your proposed price increases and ensure that COVID-19 vaccines are reasonably priced and accessible to people in the United States,” they wrote, also requesting information about the income and profit of the company.
In October, Pfizer revealed plans to sell its COVID-19 vaccine for somewhere between $110 and $130 next year. Recently, the US government only paid about $30 per dose.
The planned price increase is higher than the $50 price point that some financial analysts had expected Pfizer to command when entering the commercial market. It is as much as 10,000 percent more than the estimated production cost of the vaccine.
Warren and Welch called Pfizer’s price increase “pure and deadly greed” and accused the company of “improper profiteering”. They noted that before Pfizer posted billions in profits during the pandemic, it benefited from federal support, including building its vaccine based on basic research conducted by the National Institutes of Health, plus receiving a $1.95 billion pre-sale deal. through the government’s Operation Warp Speed.
At risk
“Thanks to billions of federal dollars used to support the production and supply of Pfizer’s vaccine product, Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine is currently free to patients in the United States,” the couple noted in their letter. According to CDC data, more than 400 million doses of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines and boosters have been administered in the US, the majority of the nearly 658 million doses administered in total. Overall, 80 percent of the U.S. population has received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.
A modeling study released Tuesday estimated that use of the vaccines saved 3 million American lives and prevented 18.6 million hospitalizations and about 120 million infections between December 2020 and November 2022. Without vaccines, the death toll from the pandemic would have been four times as high, the study concluded.
“This is a public health milestone,” Warren and Welch wrote of the vaccines. “But this progress is now jeopardized by Pfizer’s greed.” They argue that the price hike could put the vaccine out of reach for the uninsured and underinsured, “at deadly risk as the pandemic continues to kill hundreds a day in the United States.” While Pfizer has suggested that its patient assistance programs could help those without insurance, lawmakers argued that the programs’ operation and benefits were vague.
At a news event last month, Bourla was criticized for saying the company’s COVID-19 vaccine would remain “free for all Americans” despite the price hike because health insurers would cover the vaccine, leading to no out-of-pocket costs. . However, such increases in health care costs lead to rising insurance premiums, which are deducted from workers’ wages. In addition, Bourla did not address the costs for the uninsured, who currently have free access to the vaccines.
In an email to Ars, a Pfizer representative confirmed that the company had received Warren and Welch’s letter, but declined to comment further as it works on its official response to the senators.
