Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel on Monday dismissed criticism of the company’s plans to increase the price of its mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines by 400 percent, arguing that the billions of dollars in federal funding the company is receiving had hardly played a role in the development of the vaccine.
Speech at the Wall Street Journal health forum
, Bancel suggested that the vaccine’s development owed much to private investors and that federal funding merely sped up development, which would have happened regardless. The comments came in response to questions about whether the company has a “moral obligation” to give back to the taxpayers who helped develop the life-saving vaccine – presumably by not dramatically raising the price of the vaccine if it were released by the federal distribution will transition to the retail market this year.
While the government was last paying $26 per dose for Moderna’s updated booster dose, the company plans to raise the price of its shots to between $110 and $130 per dose.
“The platform was funded by private investors. The platform was not funded by the government,” argued Bancel. “What the government has done – and we’re very grateful for that and I think they’ve gotten a lot of value from it – is to speed up the development of a vaccine. We would have funded the vaccine, it would just have taken longer,” he said. The company also “didn’t get a penny” from the government to help manufacture it, he added.
Amid the pandemic, Moderna received nearly $10 billion in federal funding to develop, test, and deliver doses of vaccines to the US population. This includes around 1.7 billion US dollars from an April 2020 agreement with the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) that supported late-stage clinical development. The company also generated approximately $36 billion in vaccine sales worldwide. according to the New York Times.
However, government support for the lucrative vaccine began before the pandemic. Moderna developed its vaccine with federal researchers at the National Institutes of Health. Moderna partnered with the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in 2016 to develop a common design for mRNA vaccines. In December, Moderna paid the NIH $400 million to loan a molecular technique developed by NIH researchers to design the company’s vaccine.
The NIH is currently locked in a bitter patent battle with Moderna after the company deliberately stripped three NIAID researchers of the vaccine’s lead patent.
Bancel’s comments are sure to anger critics. And they come just two weeks before a congressional hearing by the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions on the proposed price hike for the vaccine. the hearingwhich is scheduled for March 22, is titled “Taxpayers paid billions for it: So why would Moderna consider quadrupling the price of the COVID vaccine?” Bancel has agreed to testify.
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