Moderna is quadrupling the cost of covid vaccines, from $26/dose to $110-130. Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel calls the price hike “consistent with the value” of the mRNA vaccines. Moderna’s manufacturing costs are $2.85/dose, for a 4,460% markup on every dose:
▻https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/01/moderna-may-match-pfizers-400-price-hike-on-covid-vaccines-report-says
Now, obviously the manufacturing costs are only part of the cost of making a vaccine: there’s also all the high-risk capital that goes into doing the basic research. Whenever a pharma company like Moderna hikes its prices, we’re reminded that the rewards are commensurate with these risks.
But the story of the Moderna vaccine isn’t one of a company taking huge gambles with shareholder dollars. It’s the story of the US government giving billions and billions of dollars to a private firm, which will now charge the US government – and the American people – a 4,460% markup on the resulting medicine.
Writing for The American Prospect, Lily Meyersohn reminds us of the Moderna vaccine’s origin story: the NIH spent $1.4B developing the underlying technology and then the US government bought $8b worth of vaccines at $16/dose, giving Moderna a guaranteed 460% margin on each jab:
▻https://prospect.org/health/2023-01-23-moderna-covid-vaccine-price-hike-bernie-sanders
Moderna clearly does not feel that the billions it received in public funds came with any obligation to serve the public interest. The company falsified its patent applications, omitting the NIH scientists who co-developed the vaccine, claiming sole ownership:
▻https://blog.petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2022/01/06/nih-moderna-mrna-covid-vaccine-patent
As Meyersohn writes, this omission allows Moderna to block the NIH from licensing the vaccine to foreign manufacturers – including vaccine manufacturers in the global south, home to many powerhouse producers of vaccines:
▻https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/24/waivers-for-me-not-for-thee/#vaccine-apartheid
Moderna claims to have capitulated to the NIH on the patent question, but it’s a lie – even as they were publicly announcing they would drop their bid to exclude NIH scientists from their patent application, they quietly filed for a continuance that would let them renew their exclusive claim later, when the heat has died down:
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/17/us/moderna-patent-nih.html
This maneuver, combined with Astrazeneca reneging on its promise to open its vaccine – a move engineered by Bill Gates – has deprived billions of the world’s poorest people of access to vaccines. Many of these people were previously blocked from accessing AIDS drugs when the Gates Foundation teamed up to block WTO vaccine waivers:
▻https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/public-interest-pharma/#gates-foundation
These immunucompromised, unvaccinated people are at increased risk of contracting covid, and when they do, they are sick for longer, creating more opportunities for viral mutation and new, more virulent variants.
That was where we stood before Moderna announced its 400% vaccine price-hike. Now, millions of Americans will also be blocked from accessing vaccines, opening the door for rampant, repeated infections, more mutations, and more variants. As Alex Lawson of Social Security Works told Meyersohn, at that price, the US will not be able to achieve herd immunity.
What will Moderna do with the billions it reaps through price-gouging? It won’t be research. To date, the company has spent >20% of its covid windfall profits on stock buybacks and dividends, manipulating its stock price, with more to come:
►https://www.levernews.com/how-big-pharma-actually-spends-its-massive-profits
It’s not an outlier. Big Pharma is a machine for commercializing publicly funded research and then laundering the profits with financial engineering. The largest pharma companies each spend more on stock buybacks than research:
►https://www.levernews.com/how-big-pharma-actually-spends-its-massive-profits
Moderna didn’t have a single successful product for its first decade of operation: it is only a going concern because it got billions in free public research and billions more in public commitments to buy its products at a huge markup.
It wasn’t always this way. Until the 1990s, pharma companies that commercialized public research were bound to license terms that required “reasonable pricing.” NIH inventions were subject to non-exclusive licensing terms, ensuring a competitive market.
The NIH could act to stem Moderna’s profiteering. Moderna’s vaccine (like virtually all mRNA vaccines) uses NIH patent 10,960,070 – though Moderna doesn’t license the ’070 patent. The NIH could use the threat of a patent infringement suit to force Moderna to put pandemic resilience and access to vaccines over financial engineering and executive bonuses.
When it comes to patent enforcement to protect the public interest, the USG has a long history of channeling King Log, letting companies price-gouge with products built on public research.
▻https://media.nature.com/original/magazine-assets/d41586-021-03535-x/d41586-021-03535-x.pdf
The states are stepping in where the feds have failed to act, spinning up their own pharma production capacity to create a “public option” for medicine – think of California’s move to produce insulin and other meds:
▻https://prospect.org/health/its-time-for-public-pharma
Or Massachusetts’s MassBiologics, the “only non-profit, FDA-licensed manufacturer of vaccines” in the USA, which sells its generic tetanus and diptheria vaccines nationwide:
▻https://www.umassmed.edu/massbiologics
The US has a long way to go when it comes to using public production to offer competitive discipline to private pharma. Sweden privatized its pharma in 1970. Cuba got there in 1960, and is a pharma powerhouse:
▻https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/28/somos-cuba/#omishambles
Meyersohn closes her excellent article with a warning and a promise: though public covid vaccines are a long way away, new vaccines for RSV and even cancer are in the pipeline, and without “substantial intervention,” Moderna will be a “harbinger…of crises of inequitable access to come.”
