Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna are making combined profits of $65,000 every minute from their highly successful Covid-19 vaccines while the world’s poorest countries remain largely unvaccinated, according to new analysis.
The companies have sold the vast majority of their doses to rich countries, leaving low-income nations in the lurch, said the People’s Vaccine Alliance (PVA), a coalition campaigning for wider access to Covid vaccines, which based its calculations on the firms’ own earning reports.
The alliance estimated that the trio is expected to make pre-tax profits of $34-billion this year between them, which works out to over $1,000 a second, $65,000 a minute or $93.5-million.
“It is obscene that just a few companies are making millions of dollars in profit every single hour, while just two percent of people in low-income countries have been fully vaccinated against coronavirus,” said Maaza Seyoum of the African Alliance and People’s Vaccine Alliance Africa.
“Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna have used their monopolies to prioritise the most profitable contracts with the richest governments, leaving low-income countries out in the cold.”
Pfizer and BioNTech have delivered less than 1% of their total supplies to low-income countries while Moderna has delivered just 0.2%, said the PVA. 98% of people in low-income countries have not been fully vaccinated.
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