I think so too, but do you know? I mean, only a few per cent of infectees require much medicine, and Pfizer's market share won't be 100% of that. It's not obvious that x>y.
Anyway, he may also well be thinking that the best policy is to have a history of assessments that turn out to be correct in hindsight. "Drop restrictions when the number of infections declines" is at least plausible.
Paxlovid is interesting in that it is only really effective if you take it as soon as you show any symptoms. Once production is scaled up, hundreds of millions of courses of treatment will be sold. Each around 100x more expensive than a vaccine dose.
It will soon be Pfizer's financial benefit to have as many infections as possible.
I doubt that. Consider no one was vaccinated and 1% of humans would need medication because of a "serious" case. Then the medicine would need to be 100x more expensive than the vaccine considering the alternative is everyone was vaccinated. Now consider many people got 3 or even 4 shots. It's 300x-400x now.
Also you can give the medicine to already vaccinated people that also have serious cases. So you still can sell it in a lower capacity. Also you can sell both vaccines and medicine to states in large batches which is great.
It's a big golden goose for the pharma industry.. let's never forget that.
The vast majority of people isn't going to get a specific, probably expensive medicine for what amounts to a cold for most people. I certainly won't. If anything they'll take some aspirin/paracetamol and rock on.
My guess would be to expand the current vaccine initiatives to include this medicine. Have the sniffles? Stop by CVS and get dosed. I can envision a cost model where this approach works out better for them over time.
No, because it's priced so that the expected cost of untreated illness is still going to be higher. Hospitalization is very very expensive! Also, they will probably be bought in bulk by the government and negotiated down by insurance companies to less than a thousand dollars per treatment,
But doesn't it still rely on a person getting early symptoms of COVID-19 seeking medical aid? I can't really imagine someone developing a cough and then immediately heading to their physician to get their antiviral pills.
... Wait, can you not? That's basically how tamiflu works. And one relic of the pandemic will be that at-home covid testing will be cheap, easy and available in a way that at-home flu testing is not (antigen tests are already cheap and easily available in Europe, and soon will be worldwide).
Now, I can imagine that not _all_ cases will be given the antiviral automatically. If you're a vaccinated 18 year old with no comorbidities, say, that is probably not going to be cost-effective (though, well, we'll see what happens with long covid); the chances of you landing in hospital are just very low. But if you're an overweight unvaccinated 60 year old, there's quite a good chance of you turning into a hideously expensive ICU case, and it probably makes sense to provide the treatment.
It doesn't have to a prescription, they could distribute them after a telehealth meeting, or on the same basis as vaccines, or at any pharmacy after a talk with the pharmacian, etc...
Fortunately we can trust that they aren't using any of those billions they have made to manipulate public opinion on the issue, because that would be immoral and therefore off limits.
> Then the medicine would need to be 100x [300x-400x] more expensive than the vaccine
I'm not suggesting this is true, but it would need to be 100x-400x more profitable, and that includes cost to make and store as well as the price is charged.
Maybe making mRNA vaccines costs much more than a simpler molecule like Paxlovid [0], and hospitals generally seem to charge much more than the over the counter price for everything. You've seen horror stories about $25 aspirin [1] which is easily 400x more expensive than the penny per pill cost of 500 tablets in a $5 bottle [2].
This is what i meant (profitable). Sorry bad translation. However their vaccine research was highly funded by states (at least here in Germany and I suspect everywhere else too) so.. not sure how easy it would be to calculate all of that.
That's another subtlety. They've already been funded to make the mRNA vaccine, so maybe that has been milked dry and it's time to move on to the next profitable cow. Obviously I'm just speculating that it's possible.
I cannot recall another example in my lifetime of a global populous all agreeing to purchase a pharmaceutical company's medical product - not just once, but 2-3x per person - in under two years' time.
The implications of this phenomenon on Pfizer's business model are enormous. Pfizer & others would be foolish to not pay close attention to this and figure out a way to exploit it for further gains.
On the flip side, we're also going to witness a very large portion of the population that rejects most all pharmaceutical treatments due to lack of trust. Anyone that has had any vaccine injury, even if minor. Reproductive issues are in a weird classification as being "minor" in that they aren't life threatening, but they certainly are major for young women that are planning on having children. Another group that will have their trust shattered are the people that got vaxxed and boosted, and still caught covid in a very bad way. And finally, the group that has been turned off by the haphazard communication (at best) and downright creepy coercion to get vaccinated.
My trust in the system has been thoroughly shattered, I've gone from looking down at anti-vaxxers with disdain from before the pandemic- to now being labelled as part of that crowd because I am anti mandates. The whole timing of that terminology in and of itself is interesting as well- but that's probably going too deep down the rabbit hole.
Pfizer probably got an extra $50 for you this particular year, in addition to the hundreds or thousands of dollars it gets from you every year. If you want to attack drug pricing, drug patents and pharma profits, the time to do that is every year, not just special ones.
The big question for this vaccine is why we rewarded this fully taxpayer-funded development and testing with a patent monopoly.
> I cannot recall another example in my lifetime of a global populous all agreeing to purchase a pharmaceutical company's medical product - not just once, but 2-3x per person - in under two years' time.
Well this is the first major global pandemic in a century, so that would stand to reason, no? Most of the world received the polio vaccine within a few years of its discovery btw
The rollout of COVID-19 vaccines was far faster than Salk's polio vaccine. It was not used in lower income countries for quite a while, really until OPV came along to really get going. The vaccine was made by multiple manufacturers in the US, including what is now Pfizer.
> Pfizer is going to be making a lot more money from their COVID treatments than from the vaccine
If you're saying it's false you should please post a source or at least some kind of napkin calculation. It's not intuitive at all. Otherwise it just sounds like you're beating the already dead "pharma companies sole motivation is money" horse.
That is a trivial conclusion. Much has been written about it. Pfizer themselves have written they estimate 67 billion dollars in revenue each year from Paxlovid, which is way more than their vaccine revenues and it's not even close. If you want my back-of-the-napkin calculation, here it is.
The cost of a generic Paxlovid course of treatment is around 40$. The cost of treatment, negotiated down by the government (and thus higher for other parties) is around 600$. So the marginal profit from a course of treatment of Paxlovid is around 540$.
On the other hand, a vaccine dose costs 20$, and it is very difficult to manufacture. A reasonable estimate of profit is 10$ per dose. This is an overestimate, because Pfizer has to share a sizeable portion of the Profit with BioNTech and other companies.
Paxlovid is indicated to be taken as early as possible - and priced so that it makes financial sense for insurance companies to pay for it to avoid the cost of hospitalization. Therefore we can expect a sizeable proportion of people with COVID symptoms to take it.
Paxlovid reduces the symptomatic illness period, so there is also a very strong incentive for individuals to take it as it allows them to be less sick. For the less fortunate, it also means less sick days to take, which may be crucial to make ends meet.
If we're expecting everyone to take a vaccine dose every six months (which we all know will never happen), that's 20$/person.year from the vaccine.
If we expect everyone to have COVID symptoms every year (which is almost certainly an underestimate), at 540$/person.year, we only need to have a 3.7% take rate for Paxlovid in order for it to generate more profit than everyone taking two doses every year (which, again, will never even come close to happening).
So as long as 3.7% of the population takes one Paxlovid course of treatment every year, Pfizer will make more profit from Paxlovid than the vaccine.
So it is trivially true that widespread COVID infection (and low vaccination numbers) is going to be Pfizer's financial incentive.
You are right and I misread. I will edit my comment. That being said 20-35 billion are estimates for the current year, which are already close to projected revenue estimates for Pfizer (not BioNTech) from the vaccine.
> the treatment of mild-to-moderate coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in adults and pediatric patients with positive results of direct SARS-CoV-2 testing, and who are at high risk for progression to severe COVID-19, including hospitalization or death
It's not that everyone with a Covid infection will get the drug. That number should be far lower than 3.7% of the population, most of which will either be asymptomatic or likely won't require hospitalization due to low risk. I wonder what that means for your calculation.
They don't have enough supply yet for this incentive to be in effect. Once they reach the tipping point, look forward to them changing their tune. The good news is that it might actually align with the public's best interest.
Pfizer is going to be making 5.7 billion dollars in revenue from Paxlovid at the bare minimum in the next 6 months, in the US. That's around as much revenue as 300 million vaccine doses. We are already past the tipping point, as of around 20 days ago.
That is not true. Pfizer is going to be making a lot more money from their COVID treatments than from the vaccine.