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Moderna plans to increase the price of its COVID-19 vaccine by more than 400%, from $26 per dose to between $110 and $130 per dose, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
Ars reached out to Moderna for comment but has yet to get a response. The plan, if realized, would fit with the previously announced price increase for Pfizer-BioNTech’s rival COVID-19 vaccine.
The Journal spoke to Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel at the JP Morgan Healthcare convention in San Francisco on Monday, who said of the 400% increase in price: “I think this kind of pricing is consistent with the price. “
So far, Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 mRNA-based vaccines have been purchased through the government and offered cheaply to Americans. In the last federal contract in July, Moderna’s updated recall charges the government $26 per dose, compared with $15 to $16 consistent with dosing in previous source contracts, the Journal notes. Similarly, the government paid just over $30 consistent with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine dose last summer, compared to $19. 50 consistent with the dose in the 2020 contracts.
But now that the government is moving away from vaccine distribution, its brands are turning to the advertising market, with value shifts. Financial analysts had predicted in the past that Pfizer would peg the advertising value of its vaccine at just $50 depending on the dose. however, they were surprised in October when Pfizer announced plans worth between $110 and $130. Analysts then predicted that Pfizer’s value would push Moderna and other vaccine makers to stick to them, which turns out is now going down.
Lawmakers have already criticized Pfizer for the sharp increase. In a letter sent last month to Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass. ) and Peter Welch (D-Vt. ) called the increase in value “pure and fatal greed. “and accused the company of “undue profits. “
“We urge you to forgo proposed value increases and ensure that COVID-19 vaccines are quite valuable and available to others in the United States,” they wrote.
The revelation that Moderna may fit into Pfizer’s value building comes just one day after Moderna announced that its COVID-19 vaccine sales in 2022 amounted to around $18. 4 billion.
“We enter 2023 in a position, with significant momentum in our clinical portfolio, a very dynamic team and a strong balance sheet of more than $18 billion in money and money equivalents,” Moderna’s Bancel said in a press release Monday.
Moderna also noted in the statement that it expects a minimum of $5 billion in sales of COVID-19 vaccines in 2023.
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