The pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and Moderna will raise the price of their vaccines in the contracts currently being negotiated with the European Union. This is the information given by the British newspaper Financial Times on Sunday 1 August 2021. The English daily also revealed that the price of the Pfizer vaccine is expected to increase by about 25% and that of Moderna by just over 10%. This increase is occurring in a global context where the Delta variant is causing havoc, especially in Africa.
The price of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines will rise in the coming days. According to the British newspaper Financial Times, the two laboratories, forced to adapt their vaccines to the new variants, plan to increase prices in new contracts with the European Union. According to an article published on Sunday 1 August in the UK newspaper, the Pfizer and Moderna laboratories have increased the prices of their vaccines sold to the European Union from 15.50 to 19.50 euros for the first and from 19 to 21.50 euros for the second. The information was confirmed this Monday, August 2, 2021 by the Secretary of State for European Affairs, Clément Beaune. ‘You have to look at this in a rational way, not to be fooled obviously but to have more demanding contracts, with products adapted to the variants probably yes, not only for the European Union, for all buyers it will be a little more expensive.’, he justified.
Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are known to be effective against the Delta variant. Taking advantage of the success of their serum, the two laboratories have seen their number of contracts increase with profits estimated at billions of dollars.
Oxfam, in a report released on 29 July 2021, condemned this future increase in the price of these vaccines in a context where many middle-income countries are struggling to ensure their vaccination campaign. She finds that the laboratories took advantage of the health crisis to make money. According to a survey carried out by this NGO, the European Union paid 31 billion euros more than the cost of producing the vaccines. The pharmaceutical companies are taking advantage of their monopoly to inflate the selling price of their vaccine disproportionately,” the NGO denounced.
