The decision to allow advance payment to Pfizer took 2 months

Manila, Philippines – If President Rodrigo Duterte really wanted to secure the Pfizer vaccine early, why did it take him two months to allow the advance payment to be made to the American pharmaceutical giant?

On September 4, a multi-agency meeting, including the Office of the President, was held with Pfizer officials to discuss what the Philippines’ arrangements would be once the candidate vaccine was available.

In that “first meeting”, the Undersecretary of Health, María Rosario Vergeire, said that “no commitments were made” and that the Philippine officials only explained to Pfizer the regulatory processes it had to go through and appointed an official with whom they could contact.

Confidentiality agreement

“Most of the discussions focused [on] the confidentiality disclosure agreement (CDA), which they were able to provide to the Department of Health and we already have our comments on that, ”Vergeire said in a briefing on September 7. He added that the Department of Science and Technology, which was also present at the meeting, also gave its comments on the agreement.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention noted that the parties generally signed the CDA “to ensure that a party receiving proprietary information (for example, unpublished data or technical knowledge) will keep the information confidential for a period of time. certain period of time. “In addition to Pfizer, the Philippines also signed a CDA with Moderna.

According to Vergeire, when Pfizer asked if the government could provide an estimate of how many doses of vaccines it would order in advance, Health Secretary Francisco Duque III said that the agencies involved would have to discuss it first “as we have a limitation when it comes to ordering. in advance without the products still due to the Republic Law No. 9184 ”, or the procurement law.

In his televised speech on Sept. 14, the president criticized drug companies that asked the government to make upfront payments in order to purchase their vaccines. He didn’t mention any companies but, incidentally, he spoke a week after the Pfizer meeting.

Reservation fee

“That is a bad thing in Western countries: profit, profit, profit. There’s a pandemic and you say, ‘Okay, we have something for sale or something to sell you. Then he’ll be happy, only to collapse when the next sentence is said, ‘but he has to make a cash advance before we ship it, ”Duterte said.

“Now they’re asking, like, a reserve fee,” he said of the company that was “really in the advanced stage of clinical trials.”

“[Y]You want us to make a reservation by depositing money, you must be crazy. Why would I buy into that? [manner]? Because the procurement law of the Philippines, this country, does not allow you to buy something that does not exist or is still being produced, ”said Duterte.

In early November, Pfizer and its partner BioNTech released interim results for their candidate vaccine, which was later found to have a 95 percent efficacy rate. In the intervening months, advanced economies like New Zealand, Canada and the European Union reached agreements with Pfizer.

In the case of the European Union, it was even able to increase the number of doses it expected from Pfizer in 2021 to 300 million.

In July, Pfizer said it could make 100 million doses by the end of the year. But the company revised its projection last month, saying it expected to produce up to 50 million doses this year and up to 1.3 billion doses by the end of 2021.

100 million doses for the US

“[It] begs the question, ‘how can we have the 10 million for the Philippines by January when Pfizer falls short [of its] originally announced a 100 million dose volume for 2020? “Not to mention that the country of origin is the first to enter,” Duque told the Inquirer.

Three of the four Pfizer facilities that are manufacturing the vaccine are based in the United States, to which it has an agreement to supply 100 million doses. Duque said he signed the CDA with Pfizer in October. However, it was not until late November that Duterte approved the advance payment to Pfizer.

At a news conference last month, presidential spokesman Harry Roque said Duterte allowed upfront payments to manufacturers out of fear that the country might lose out in the race to secure the vaccine.

“At first, the president disapproved of advance payments, but when he saw a list of countries that were paying in advance, he decided that we should not be left behind as long as we had funds,” Roque said.

Industry data showed that of the more than 12 billion doses of vaccines that various manufacturers are expected to produce next year, about 9 billion doses will come from five countries: the United States, India, China, France and the United Kingdom. The Philippines, through a private initiative, has obtained only 2.6 million doses from the British-Swedish pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca.

Although Duterte has shown a preference in the past for the Russian vaccine, Sputnik V, it is not yet clear whether the Philippines will get supplies or whether it has secured a deal for the initial distribution scheduled for the first quarter of 2021.

Duque said that the director of the vaccine program, Carlito Gálvez Jr., could provide updates on the Russian vaccine at the press conference scheduled for Friday.

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