Moderna's founders are making a mint from COVID vaccines. But the company is failing its commitment to provide shots to the less wealthy nations.
of its vaccine to COVAX in the first half of next year. The doses will be sold at the company’s lowest price. Moderna also announced that it will build a “state-of-the-art facility” in Africa with the ultimate capacity to turn out 500 million doses per year.
As Frieden points out, beyond the moral imperative it’s in the interest of developed countries to get the rest of the world vaccinated. Unvaccinated populations can harbor new variants of the pandemic virus that could evade the vaccines we have today. That would trigger the need for yet more billions of new vaccines and booster shots.
Moderna has received much of the criticism failing to meet global demand for several reasons. One is that its vaccine production has lagged behind other manufacturers including Pfizer. Column: Following FDA approval of Pfizer’s shot, the anti-vaccine movement cooks up new conspiracy theory Neither Pfizer nor Moderna has been shy about the billions of dollars in profits they expect to reap from their COVID vaccines. In the first six months of this year ended June 30, Moderna pocketed $4 billion in profits on $5.9 billion in revenue, almost entirely from its COVID vaccine, its only product.