African Alliance and People’s Vaccine Alliance Africa’s new figures reveal that the top three pharma companies behind two of the most successful vaccines against Covid-19 are making combined profits of $65,000 every minute.
The information is based on the latest reports Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna have released before the pharmaceutical industry CEO’s meet at the ‘Big Pharma Davos,’ the annual STAT summit from 16-18 November
The African Alliance and People’s Vaccine Alliance Africa (PVA) noted on Tuesday that the prodigious profit is a result of wealthy nations snapping up their products while plans to offer the jab at a discount to poorer nations, where just two percent of people have been fully vaccinated, have largely fallen through.
Their statement points that it is obscene for few companies to make millions of dollars every single hour while a whopping 98% of poor people can’t even afford the basic protection against COVID.
The PVA has even asked Big Pharma to waive the intellectual property rights under a WTO agreement and suspend temporarily their rights regarding Covid-19 vaccines, but that move was blocked by wealthy nations like Germany and the UK.
The NGOs calculations show that the pharma trio will have jointly realized $34 billion with sums that work out to $93.5 million per day but despite this, Pfizer and BioNTech had delivered less than 1% of their supply to low-income nations while Moderna had done even worse with just 0.2% of its supplies, delivering to poorer countries.
Maaza Seyoum of the African Alliance underlined that the three pharma giants have left low-income countries out in the cold and used their monopolies to put the most profitable contracts with the richest governments first.
Foreseeing an end to the Covid-19 pandemic, even AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson plan to wind down their arrangements though they were so far more successful in distributing their vaccines on a not-for-profit basis.
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