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A Belgian minister has inadvertently revealed a sensitive trade secret: the price the EU has agreed to pay for major Covid vaccines.
Belgium’s state budget secretary Eva De Bleeker posted the price list on Twitter, with the quantities of each vaccine her country intends to buy from the EU. The tweet was removed quickly, but not soon enough to prevent interested parties from taking screenshots, which have now been made public.
While drug access activists were delighted with transparency, drug companies were not. Pfizer complained of a breach of confidentiality. “These prices are covered by a confidentiality clause in the contract with the European Commission,” Elisabeth Schraepen, spokeswoman for the American pharmaceutical company for the Benelux region, told the Belgian daily Le Soir.
The price list revealed that the Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccine is the cheapest and Modern is the most expensive, as already known. But the details allow countries that may be negotiating with vaccine manufacturers to take a harder line.
This is the list of what the EU pays:
Every country in the world has an interest in mass vaccination against Covid and there is a great effort underway to come up with a program to ensure that all countries can access enough to vaccinate the vulnerable. But the prices of drugs and vaccines have always been closely guarded trade secrets.
“We cannot say anything about this case, everything related to vaccines and prices is covered by confidentiality clauses, in the interest of society and also in the interest of the ongoing negotiations,” said a spokesman for the commission of the UE at a press conference.
Belgium is buying more than 33 million vaccines for a total of 279 million euros (253 million pounds sterling).
The UK, which is not part of the EU scheme, has obtained 357 million doses of seven different vaccines, including 40 million doses of Pfizer / BioNTech, which was licensed for use in the UK earlier than the rest of the world. It also has 100 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine.
A UK government spokesperson said: ‘The cost of each government-insured vaccine was negotiated on a case-by-case basis and assessed to ensure value for money, while giving the UK the best opportunity to rapidly source and deploy a vaccine. safe and effective “.
The UK, like the EU, has paid a considerable amount of money up front to help develop a number of vaccines that may or may not work, including AstraZeneca’s, so final prices will be lower. However, it was not compatible with Pfizer / BioNTech or Moderna, so you will get a high price for those vaccines.
The United States has paid higher prices than Europe. Bernstein Research, an investment and research firm, calculated that the EU has a 24% discount on the Pfizer vaccine compared to the United States. Part of the reason may be that Europe helped fund BioNTech’s original research.
The United States will pay $ 4 per dose for the Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccine in development, compared to the EU price of 1.78 euros, which is 45% cheaper, according to Bernstein.
At the other end of the scale, Moderna’s vaccine, developed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with $ 2.5 billion in funding and Operation Warp Speed orders, will cost 20% more in the European market: $ 18 a dose compared to $ 15 in the US
Drugs and vaccines have traditionally been more expensive in the US because there is no cost-effectiveness mechanism, as there is in the UK and some other countries, to decide whether they are value for money. The free market works and medicines are paid for through health insurance plans.
