Study: corona vaccine makers earn $1,000 per second | Financial

The coalition estimates that the three pharmaceutical companies will jointly make $34 billion in pre-tax profits this year, or $93.5 million a day. The companies have sold the vast majority of their doses to rich countries, while the world’s poorest countries remain largely unvaccinated.

“It is obscene that only a few companies make millions of dollars in profits every hour, while only 2 percent of people in low-income countries are fully vaccinated against the coronavirus,” said Maaza Seyoum of the African Alliance and the People’s Vaccine Alliance Africa.

Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna have used their monopoly positions to prioritize the most profitable contracts with the wealthiest governments, according to the PVA. Pfizer and BioNTech delivered less than 1 percent of their total deliveries to low-income countries, while Moderna delivered just 0.2 percent.

The actions of the three companies contrast with those of British-Swedish pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson, the parent company of vaccine maker Janssen from Leiden, who have supplied their vaccines on a non-profit basis. The two companies have announced that they foresee that this arrangement will end in the future once the pandemic comes to an end.

The PVA, which in addition to the African Alliance consists of Global Justice Now, Oxfam and UNAIDS, is therefore again calling on pharmaceutical companies to transfer their vaccine technology to producers in low- and middle-income countries via the World Health Organization (WHO). That move could increase the global supply of vaccines, lower prices and save millions of lives, according to the coalition. More than a hundred countries, including the United States, support that move, but it is being blocked by rich countries, including the United Kingdom and Germany.

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