Today Pfizer announced that it has made $81 billion in revenues in 2021, double its figures from last year. The company’s Covid-19 vaccine itself...

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Hi John,
Today Pfizer announced that it made $81 billion in revenues in 2021, double its figures from 2020 (1). The company’s Covid-19 vaccine itself made $37 billion, making it the most lucrative drug of all time by annual revenue.

Pfizer’s vaccine revenues are seven times larger than government health spending across all low-income countries, the same places where only 10% of people have received a single vaccine dose. The company has brought in $16 billion more than the previously most lucrative drug, Humira, a drug whose own price has been hiked 470% since it entered the market. If you lined up Pfizer’s revenues in $100 bills, they’d stretch all the way round the world.

Fundamentally, today’s news means Pfizer has been richly rewarded for keeping its vaccine recipe secret, restricting who can make it and, therefore, who has access to it. Monopoly capitalism is alive and well. Pfizer has profiteered handsomely from vaccine apartheid.

Please share this graphic and tell Pfizer to stop hoarding their vaccine recipes.
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Pfizer charges up to $29 per dose for its Covid-19 vaccine, while experts estimate it could be produced for as little as $1.18 (2). The company’s CEO Albert Bourla has claimed the real problem is vaccine hesitancy in low-income countries (3), all while lobbying against the patent waiver these countries are demanding to ensure their own supply. Last year, former director of the US Centres for Disease Control, Tom Frieden, branded the firm “war profiteers.”

Pfizer’s devotees in market-fundamentalist circles protest that such profiteering is necessary to reward and incentivise producing vaccines. But Pfizer didn’t create this drug. The mRNA technology it is based on was the result of years of US state investment in vaccines. And it was BioNTech that carried out the development work, again backed by millions in German public funding.

Not only this, but any risk was taken out of Pfizer’s investment by the promises of governments to place huge advance orders, well before the vaccine was approved. What Pfizer brought to the table was years of honing a business model that pounces upon and monopolises the research of others.

An academic paper released last week emphasised what we already know. Big pharma profits have the sketchiest relationship to incentivising useful research (4). The pharma industry’s share of net profits among the world’s largest companies towers above the rest. Yet only a small fraction of new drugs represent important breakthroughs.

We cannot rely on companies like Pfizer to protect global health, because they simply won’t do it. But there is hope in the alternative models springing up around the world. The WHO-backed South African vaccine facility, currently reverse-engineering Moderna’s vaccine, aims to use its knowledge to teach others how to make it, not to make monopoly profits. Cuba, meanwhile, has also said it will share the vaccine it has created through open licensing and at low prices. Similarly, scientists at the Texas Children’s Hospital say their vaccine will remain patent-free and profit-free. Another system is possible. It’s a question of where we place our resources and which rules we allow these companies to play by.

The Pfizer model is failing the world and it’s costing lives. The time for a reckoning is now.

Will you join us in condemning Pfizer’s profiteering?
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Thanks for your support,

Tim Bierley
Campaigner at Global Justice Now

PS. Our director Nick Dearden also has a Guardian article ([link removed]) on Pfizer’s pandemic windfall today.

Notes

1. Pfizer predicts bumper year from Covid vaccine and pill as profits double ([link removed]) , The Guardian, 8 February 2022
2. Vaccine Wars: Truth About Pfizer, Channel 4 Dispatches ([link removed])
3. The inside story of the Pfizer vaccine: ‘a once-in-an-epoch windfall’ ([link removed]) , Financial Times (paywall)
4. Don’t worry about the drug industry’s profits when considering a waiver on covid-19 intellectual property rights ([link removed]) , BMJ, 31 January 2022
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