When President Biden joined a push to set aside patents for Covid shots, he entered a roiling debate over how to ensure poor countries get enough vaccine.
The Biden administration, siding with some world leaders over the U.S. pharmaceutical industry, came out in favor of waiving intellectual property protections for coronavirus vaccines.
Pfizer Reaps Hundreds of Millions in Profits From Covid Vaccine
The company said its vaccine generated $3.5 billion in revenue in the first three months of this year.
Pfizer’s vaccine is disproportionately reaching the world’s rich.Credit.Dado Ruvic/Reuters
May 4, 2021Updated 9:26 a.m. ET
Last year, racing to develop a vaccine in record time, Pfizer made a big decision: Unlike several rival manufacturers, which vowed to forgo profits on their shots during the Covid-19 pandemic, Pfizer planned to profit on its vaccine.
On Tuesday, the company announced just how much money the shot is generating.
The vaccine brought in $3.5 billion in revenue in the first three months of this year, nearly a quarter of its total revenue, Pfizer reported. The vaccine was, far and away, Pfizer’s biggest source of revenue.
Aaron E. Carroll, a professor of pediatrics, writes that some danger will still exist when things return to “normal.”
Since India and South Africa first proposed the idea of a Trips waiver last October, the drug industry has protested. In March, 31 pharmaceutical-industry executives, including Albert Bourla of Pfizer and Pascal Soriot of AstraZeneca, sent a letter to Mr. Biden urging him to uphold the Trump administration’s opposition to the Trips waiver. They claimed that under current estimates, manufacturers will produce 10 billion doses of the Covid-19 vaccine by the end of the year, “enough to vaccinate the entire current global vaccine eligible population.”