HLN / POLITICO : How much do the corona vaccines cost? Until recently, little or nothing was known about this. The EU has been secretive about prices for months and it has been confirmed several times in the European Parliament that it is bound by contractual secrecy.
The European Commission has said it cannot disclose the prices paid for each coronavirus vaccine, citing commercial confidentiality agreements. “The European Commission is legally unable to release information from the contracts.”
However, Belgium’s State Secretary for Budget Eva De Bleeker (Open Vld) has accidentally broken through that European secrecy.
According to the screenshot published by HLN, the EU is spending between €1.78 and $18 per coronavirus vaccine. The price per dose listed for each of the six vaccines was as follows
According to a deleted tweet, there are enormous differences. For example, the Belgian government will pay less than 2 euros per dose for the vaccine from AstraZeneca and has to pay 12 euros per dose of the Pfizer vaccine.
The Moderna vaccine is also remarkably more expensive than the rest at 18 dollars per dose (14.7 euros). For the vaccines from Curevac, Sanofi / GSK and Johnson & Johnson, the prices vary between 7 euros and 10 euros.
A number of pharmaceutical companies – including Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca – have indicated in the past that they would not sell their vaccines for a profit.
They argued that they will only pass on the cost of development and production. In any case, it is striking that these two vaccines are the cheapest of all. In the fine print of the contract with the EU, however, AstraZeneca would have stated that it can still sell its vaccine at a profit once the pandemic has passed. In this way, the pharmaceutical company could still drive up the price in the coming years.
Pfizer and Moderna have already indicated several times that they want to make a profit on their product. The Pfizer CEO called the idea of operating at cost price in the spring ‘radical’.
“You have to be a fanatic to say such a thing. Because who comes up with the solution? The private sector. ” However, that has been contradicted by NGOs pointing to the billions of taxpayers’ money spent in both the EU and the US to support vaccine research. Pfizer, for example, received more than 400 million euros in public support from the German government.
Moderna, on the other hand, received more than two billion euros in government support. Yet it is precisely those two firms that demand the highest prices.
According to HLN, the European Commission said: “We will not comment on what happened in Belgium, but the prices of the vaccines are confidential.”
