Sanders cries foul
Following news reports that the pharmaceutical corporation plans to quadruple its price for the COVID-19 vaccine up to $130 per dose, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the incoming chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, on Tuesday sent a letter to Moderna’s CEO urging the company to reconsider its decision and refrain from any price increase in light of the role the federal government has played in the development of the vaccine.
Sanders wrote: “The huge increase in price that you have proposed will have a significantly negative impact on the budgets of Medicaid, Medicare and other government programs that will continue covering the vaccine without cost-sharing for patients. Your decision will cost taxpayers billions of dollars. Your outrageous price boost will also increase private health insurance premiums. Perhaps most significantly, the quadrupling of prices will make the vaccine unavailable for many millions of uninsured and underinsured Americans who will not be able to afford it. How many of these Americans will die from COVID-19 as a result of limited access to these lifesaving vaccines? While nobody can predict the exact figure, the number could well be in the thousands. In the midst of a deadly pandemic, restricting access to this much needed vaccine is unconscionable.”
While the price hike planned by the company would make the lifesaving vaccine unaffordable for millions of Americans, estimates show that the cost of producing the vaccine is now as low as $2.85 per dose – 2.2% of what Moderna plans to charge. Meanwhile, over the last two years, Moderna made over $19 billion in profits off of the COVID-19 vaccine which they developed in partnership with scientists from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a U.S. government agency that is funded by U.S. taxpayers. The federal government directly provided $1.7 billion to Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine research and development, and guaranteed the company billions more in sales.
While nearly 1.1 million Americans died from COVID-19 in the last three years and over 100 million more have become ill, Moderna has used those profits to provide incredibly extravagant compensation packages to top officials at the company. In addition to CEO Bancel becoming a multi-billionaire as a direct result of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine, with Forbes currently estimating his wealth at $6.1 billion, Noubar Afeyan, Moderna’s chairman and co-founder, is currently worth $2.1 billion; Robert Langer, another co-founder of Moderna, is now worth $2.2 billion; and Timothy Springer, a founding investor in Moderna is now worth $2.6 billion.
“The purpose of the recent taxpayer investment in Moderna was to protect the health and lives of the American people, not to turn a handful of corporate executives and investors into multi-billionaires,” Sanders wrote to CEO Bancel. “As you know, the federal government, over the years, has supported Moderna every step of the way going back to 2013 when your company reportedly only had three employees. Now, in the midst of a continuing public health crisis and a growing federal deficit, is not the time for Moderna to be quadrupling the price of this vaccine. Now is not the time for unacceptable corporate greed.”
Read the full letter, here.