#Moderna is quadrupling the cost of #covid #vaccines, from $26/dose to $110-130. Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel calls the price hike "consistent with the value" of the #MRNA vaccines. Moderna's manufacturing costs are $2.85/dose, for a 4,460% markup on every dose:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/24/nationalize-moderna/#herd-immunity
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Now, obviously the manufacturing costs are only part of the cost of making a vaccine: there's also all the high-risk capital that goes into doing the basic research. Whenever a pharma company like Moderna hikes its prices, we're reminded that the rewards are commensurate with these risks.
But the story of the Moderna vaccine isn't one of a company taking huge gambles with shareholder dollars.
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It's the story of the US government giving billions and billions of dollars to a private firm, which will now *charge* the US government - and the American people - a 4,460% markup on the resulting medicine.
Writing for *The American Prospect*, Lily Meyersohn reminds us of the Moderna vaccine's origin story.
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The #NIH spent $1.4B developing the underlying tech and then the USG bought $8b worth of vaccines at $16/dose, giving Moderna a guaranteed 460% margin on each jab:
https://prospect.org/health/2023-01-23-moderna-covid-vaccine-price-hike-bernie-sanders/
Moderna clearly does not feel that the billions it received in public funds came with any obligation to serve the public interest. The company falsified its patent applications, omitting the NIH scientists who co-developed the vaccine, claiming sole ownership:
https://blog.petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2022/01/06/nih-moderna-mrna-covid-vaccine-patent/
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As Meyersohn writes, this omission allows Moderna to block the NIH from licensing the vaccine to foreign manufacturers - including vaccine manufacturers in the global south, home to many powerhouse producers of vaccines:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/24/waivers-for-me-not-for-thee/#vaccine-apartheid
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Moderna claims to have capitulated to the NIH on the patent question, but it's a lie - even as they were publicly announcing they would drop their bid to exclude NIH scientists from their patent application, they quietly filed for a continuance that would let them renew their exclusive claim later, when the heat has died down:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/17/us/moderna-patent-nih.html
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This maneuver, combined with #Astrazeneca reneging on its promise to open its vaccine - a move engineered by #BillGates - has deprived billions of the world's poorest people of access to vaccines. Many of these people were previously blocked from accessing #AIDS drugs when the #GatesFoundation teamed up to block #WTO #VaccineWaivers:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/public-interest-pharma/#gates-foundation
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These #immunucompromised, #unvaccinated people are at increased risk of contracting covid, and when they do, they are sick for longer, creating more opportunities for viral mutation and new, more virulent #variants.
That was where we stood *before* Moderna announced its 400% vaccine price-hike. Now, millions of Americans will *also* be blocked from accessing vaccines, opening the door for rampant, repeated infections, more mutations, and more variants.
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As Alex Lawson of Social Security Works told Meyersohn, at that price, the US will not be able to achieve #HerdImmunity.
What will Moderna do with the billions it reaps through price-gouging? It won't be research. To date, the company has spent >20% of its covid windfall profits on stock buybacks and dividends, manipulating its stock price, with more to come:
https://www.levernews.com/how-big-pharma-actually-spends-its-massive-profits/
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It's not an outlier. Big Pharma is a machine for commercializing public research and then laundering the profits with #FinancialEngineering. The largest pharma companies each spend more on stock buybacks than research:
https://www.levernews.com/how-big-pharma-actually-spends-its-massive-profits/
Moderna didn't have a single successful product for its first decade of operation: it is only a going concern because it got billions in free public research and billions more in public commitments to buy its products at a huge markup.
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It wasn't always this way. Until the 1990s, pharma companies that commercialized public research were bound to license terms that required "reasonable pricing." NIH inventions were subject to non-exclusive licensing terms, ensuring a competitive market.
The NIH could act to stem Moderna's #profiteering. Moderna's vaccine (like virtually all mRNA vaccines) uses NIH patent 10,960,070 - though Moderna doesn't license the '070 patent.
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The NIH could use the threat of a patent infringement suit to force Moderna to put pandemic resilience and access to vaccines over financial engineering and executive bonuses.
When it comes to patent enforcement to protect the public interest, the USG has a long history of channeling King Log, letting companies price-gouge with products built on public research.
https://media.nature.com/original/magazine-assets/d41586-021-03535-x/d41586-021-03535-x.pdf
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The states are stepping in where the feds have failed to act, spinning up their own pharma production capacity to create a #PublicOption for medicine - think of California's move to produce #insulin and other meds:
https://prospect.org/health/its-time-for-public-pharma/
Or Massachusetts's #MassBiologics, the "only non-profit, FDA-licensed manufacturer of vaccines" in the USA, which sells its generic #tetanus and #diptheria vaccines nationwide:
https://www.umassmed.edu/massbiologics/
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The US has a long way to go when it comes to using public production to offer competitive discipline to private pharma. Sweden privatized its pharma in 1970. Cuba got there in 1960, and is a pharma powerhouse:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/28/somos-cuba/#omishambles
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the Novavax vaccine is a good non mRNA vaccine alternative & it has an open license. This singular focus on the new technology is harming our ability to really address useful solutions. Also, perhaps watching the corporate greed play out in real time will help fire up the proletariat.
@pluralistic Yup and the justice department is pushing for vaccine booster mandates.
So force us to buy a over priced and "currently***" faulty product that can affect our health. Win, win for big pharma.
The rest of us get fucked.
**** privet studies from Israeli and swiss Doctors show the newest batch of vaccines are less effective then the original by 30% or something. I'm not a doctor.****
@pluralistic Big pharma is guilting of this, creating the opioid crisis and incentivizing doctors to overprescribe drugs.
I believe most doctors stepped back from this practice but this very thing turned my sisters brain to mush before her overdosing and dying.
Big pharma needs to have all production, distribution and competitive advantages stripped away, including paying massive fines for these atrocities.
This shoul be a quote tweet, but 3 buck Moderna is also 97 % publicly funded research.
@shaktinah @pluralistic That's not what's going to happen, though; the mandates "will never come back" and the jurisdictions (globally) will pay for what they can afford e.g., not Moderna, and not the best-matched product for the circulating strain.
See also: the flu.
I missed my one chance to get the Moderna bivalent booster and now I'm sorry I did. 11% increased risk of dying of the plague, for me and mine now, versus 7% and possibly full-Omicron coverage protection with the Moderna booster.
Ah well. If there's any left, and there's not a wildly divergent from Omicron plague circulating by then, I'll update with Moderna. But I highly doubt that, given the circumstances.
@shaktinah @pluralistic agreed. This is another arrow in the quiver of anti vaxxers and others who pushed back at covid controls.
I, too, am up to date on my boosters, and I figured that as the pandemic dust settled, all kinds of “capitalism being capitalism” stories would emerge and be spun for political ends.
Call me crazy, but I think we’ve taken this whole “capitalism” thing too far
I'm sick of my health being listed on the NYS and a company profiting.
@pluralistic By the logic of:
"Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel calls the price hike "consistent with the value" of the #MRNA vaccines."
A bottle of water should be worth far more. How long can you live without water?
I got my two-shot Pfizer with a Moderna booster. I’m not getting any more until there is some assurance of long-term efficacy. This is slowly becoming madness. Moderna top execs are all multi-billionaires now. And now they have even less incentive to develop an efficacious vaccine.
Class action lawsuit?
And, again, I think that royalties in general should be capped.
Easy here: demand a r&d cost sheet on e.g. the FDA application for clinical use and cap it (the cap can be set on more than that one number if appropriate)
And I think the same should apply to e.g. music, after so many platin records it is a common part of society (if not, please compensate me big time for listening to some 90s to today vocoder crap, it hurts and cripples my health).
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