Coronavirus and the money behind vaccines | FT Film

of all the products in the world you don't want to use market-based prioritization it's got to be vaccines [Music] there's no technology known to man now that is faster than money because of this monopoly or duopoly position that the sellers are in they tend to have a high amount of market power and ability to get higher prices vaccines save two to three million lives every year but bringing them to market involves huge investments complex science and secretive contracts before the covet 19 pandemic few people paid attention to the business models behind vaccines the global pharmaceutical market was worth 1.3 trillion dollars in 2019. vaccines made up just three percent of that generating around 33 billion dollars of revenue that compared to 142 billion dollars from cancer drugs so how do the economics of vaccines work who funds them how profitable are they and will the covet 19 pandemic and new technology disrupt the vaccine market forever until recently there have really only been four main players in the vaccine market glaxosmithkline merck pfizer and sanofi they represented 90 percent of vaccine industry revenues in 2019 even for these market leaders developing a vaccine is a costly and time-consuming gamble the process often takes a decade work on infectious diseases is often very obscure because the burden is so much out of sight in the rich countries and where the deep scientific and manufacturing power is government is the main funder of the science and that's critical and you know all of the benefits we have today if you think about the sequence analysis or the mrnas and you know the biotechnology the new manufacturing all of that came out of investments in basic science as you go into phase one trials these are taken over by industry maybe one in every ten vaccines in a phase one trial goes on to be approved while fifty to seventy percent of vaccines in phase three trials end up being approved they will only invest once the market and the chances of success are well known this doesn't mean there's zero risk but largely what we see is that the public sector takes on most of that but indeed this is what allows the business of vaccines to operate the cost of creating a vaccine varies widely on average it ranges from several hundred million to a few billion dollars supply demand and pricing for vaccines are determined by a small number of actors on the buyer side national governments and organizations like gavi the vaccine alliance and unicef are among the biggest purchasers on the seller side are the pharma companies because the development costs and regulatory barriers for vaccines are high companies can maintain their monopolies for longer it tends to have a high amount of market power and ability to get higher prices than let's say a generic a generic small molecule drug or even a vaccine for which we have lots of lots of competitors up until gabi was created the global alliance vaccines in the year 2000 there was no purchasing power to get those new vaccines to the kids who needed the most so that was this great irony that for example rotavirus and pneumococcus vaccines uh that now saved millions of young children's lives they weren't getting out in these countries normally what happens is when vaccines come out they come out at a high price in a low volume and over time as the yield goes up as other manufacturers begin to produce it prices come down dramatically to give an example are vaccines that are the who approved vaccines you know cost over thirteen hundred dollars if you looked it in the u.s model and we pay 27 for those so it's a pretty dramatic difference gavi typically negotiates procurement on behalf of 60 of the world's children they try to ensure low and middle-income countries pay significantly less for vaccines than rich countries do if the disease is in the rich world one of the western companies will invent a new vaccine with huge r d investments they'll charge a reasonably high price as much as say a hundred dollars in western markets and then eventually either they'll make a cogs oriented version or the indian or other developing country manufacturers will come in by prioritizing high volumes at low prices the serum institute of india has become the world's largest vaccine manufacturer by volume it typically produces more than 1.5 billion doses of vaccines every year which are used in 170 countries this year it has increased capacity and is aiming to manufacture at least 1 billion doses of cobin 19 vaccines alone after signing deals with astrazeneca and novovax it is more expensive to make a vaccine in the u.s and europe traditionally those companies haven't had large facilities because the volumes that they sell at are much lower but at a very high price [Music] well these are proprietary products that the companies have spent lots of money in high risk in order to go through trials they have to recover all of those and make their profit from the rich world market and the middle income market knowing that those gobby markets are not not going to give them any any meaningful margin but returns on investment are not straightforward the lack of transparency around each company's production costs makes it difficult to assess a vaccine's profitability we do know that at the top end pfizer's pneumococcal vaccine prevnar which works against pneumonia generated 5.8 billion dollars in revenue in 2019. if you've invested maybe a few hundred million dollars in the r d 10 15 20 years ago and you have a captive market then you're going to make a pretty good profit a very very healthy profit somebody would say an excessive profit at the other end of the spectrum are well-established low-cost children's vaccines like measles low profits drove several producers out of the market in the 1970s and 80s in the past decade an increase in vaccines for adults and those taken annually like the flu vaccine have helped make the market more profitable but for governments the health societal and economic returns are much greater gavi estimates a 21 return for every dollar invested in vaccine programs for the 73 countries it typically supports well the most salient number is that in the year 2000 over 10 million children under the age of 5 died every year by 2016 that number was under 5 million per year that's per year that's millions [Music] this is the way things were then came the pandemic the outbreak of kobit 19 brought china and then europe to a standstill as the novel coronavirus spread to the u.s and across the globe it wasn't long before governments were betting billions of dollars on developing vaccines to fight the pandemic a new vaccine market was about to emerge where demand was unlimited and governments would do everything in their power to secure doses [Music] the total amounts involved relative to normal vaccine r d you know it's tens of billions of dollars maybe a total of you know 25 billion or so that's gigantic in the world of vaccines now relative to the economic damage of the pandemic which is in the trillions it's truly a rounding error this is the best money that's been spent by governments during this pandemic the public sector governments collectively have really de-risked and subsidized the r d process every step of the way from the early stages of r d oftentimes to the scale up of manufacturing and of course purchasing other big funders include the bill and melinda gates foundation and sepi the coalition for epidemic preparedness innovations is a public-private partnership that supports vaccine development to stop future epidemics one recipient of a small grant from seppi at the start of the pandemic was moderna a biotech company that had yet to bring a product to market by the end of 2020 u.s federal funding for modernist vaccine had swelled into the billions and it was approved for use so moderna took a huge amount of public money up to four billion dollars from the us government and that helped them build this proof of concept the vaccine uses messenger rna technology which the company spent a decade developing we invested around 3 billion in the last 10 years to get the technology to displace the pandemic has accelerated the companies turning into a commercial company by three to maybe four years the first vaccine approved in a western country also used mrna it was made by u.s pharmaceutical giant pfizer and germany's biontech while pfizer did not take public funding to develop and manufacture its vaccine it did have an initial 1.95 billion advanced purchase agreement through operation warp speed the us government's kobit 19 investment program has surpassed 10 billion dollars most of which has been spent on vaccines it's not the only country that placed huge bets on vaccines china and russia funded their own vaccine candidates and the german government gave biontech 445 million dollars the uk government contributed 65.5 million pounds to oxford university and its vaccine manufacturing partner astrazeneca received up to 1.2 billion dollars for trials and manufacturing from the us government well there was no point in us generating a vaccine in january of last year if it wasn't going to be able to take it all the way through clinical development and into emergency use licensure and as a university we are able to do much of the early clinical development and get that taken quite a long way but we were never going to be able to manufacture a vaccine that was going to be used as a licensed product the unprecedented public funding helped these companies develop vaccines in less than a year until now the fastest vaccine ever created was a mumps vaccine developed by merck in four years the pandemic demanded an urgent response but that also led to questions about the prices of copen 19 vaccines we have a high degree of secrecy we have governments really desperate for access to vaccine supplies and willing to sometimes pay very very high prices and things are happening very quickly under emergency conditions so it's unfortunately a perfect storm where the risk of abusive pricing or unfair pricing is quite high i think pharma did hold a lot of power in this negotiation but i also think that they could have gone higher plenty of investors actually would have liked them to gone higher and didn't make a secret of that prices for covered 19 vaccines vary widely the oxford astrazeneca vaccine is about three to four dollars a dose along with johnson and johnson they have committed to selling their vaccine on a non-profit basis during the pandemic astrazeneca say they will do so in perpetuity for low and middle-income countries modernist said it has charged the u.s government as little as 16 and 50 cents per dose to return some money to taxpayers but smaller orders for other customers range from 32 dollars to dollars per dose you know we invested three billion dollar in this technology since the beginning we've never made a penny of profit we thought it was not appropriate not to make a small profit the value that we are asking for the product is way under the value to the healthcare system if you just look at the saving in just hospitalization costs they run much much higher in habitat it's very difficult to actually come up with an evidence-based judgment on the fairness of any price or the fairness of any profit merchant companies want to play countries off against each other and so aren't very incentivized to want to make these contracts transparent and democratic governments often don't want their public to know that they've gotten a bad deal or they don't want rival countries to know that they've gotten a good deal and so there's not very much incentive for making these public before the pandemic u.s pharma companies were under pressure over high prices for drugs the industry looked ripe for reform so then we come into the pandemic and you have a situation where some companies say look this shows how important it is to invest in innovation so you should you know pay us a good amount of money but then the other hand is some companies said ah this is our opportunity to make a contribution by saying we'll offer these vaccines on a non-for-profit basis i think it's reasonable to allow companies to make a profit from the high income countries having put such a huge effort into this work and also made sure that it will be available for lower middle-income countries in perpetuity without profit moderna said it expects to make 18.4 billion dollars from its kobe 19 vaccine sales this year it has not revealed the profit margin for its covet 19 vaccine pfizer said it expects to make about 15 billion dollars with a profit margin of more than 20 percent the profits will be split 50 50 with buy on tech these forecasts have partly shaped the company's varied share price performances in the past year [Music] in previous pandemics including sars the outbreak ended before companies could develop a vaccine those who invested in the endeavor made a loss but covet 19 is widely expected to become endemic analysts predict the annual vaccine market for the virus could reach 10 billion a year or more as producers tailor vaccines for new strains if the vaccines aren't very successful but they do provide a very meaningful contribution to the fight against covid then we're likely to move to something like a flu model where we sell more vaccines for the flu than we do for every other vaccinated illness in the world then the question will be are there so many competitors in the market that the price falls or the price may go up because it will be more of a natural normal market where people will perhaps choose a particular vaccine because it has a higher efficacy rate rather than a market where it's controlled by these gigantic government contracts one big question is whether government should have demanded more in these deals for subsidizing development and guaranteeing sales it does feed into a larger debate that was already happening about what happens when governments fund science especially really basic research it goes on into the private sector and it makes the private sector a lot of money but not much of that flows back to the government for governments of low and middle income countries the return on investment calculation is entirely different they are battling just to secure supplies of covid19 vaccines amid a flurry of bilateral deals between rich countries and vaccine producers and global disputes about controls over vaccine supply chains of all the products in the world you don't want to use market-based prioritization it's got to be vaccines because if you went that way you know the rich people in the rich countries would buy all the output for quite a while and it wouldn't be assigned according to who's at risk of dying for example getting to the elderly and the healthcare workers gavi the world health organization and sepi set up the kovacs program to mitigate this and provide equitable distribution for covet 19 vaccines the kovacs advanced market commitment or amc has raised 6.3 billion dollars and aims to distribute 2 billion doses this year with two-thirds of those subsidized for 92 lower-income countries we also hope that by having global supply it would reduce the number of bilaterals and it looked like that might have helped for a while but there really has been a global pen a panic given seeing doses being rolled out people hoarding doses and also the new variants have made people nervous the very same governments that have said yes we politically support kobach we will put money into kovacs it will subsidize other countries through kovacs they are the very same governments that have turned around and said uh we are going to basically eat up most of the world's existing volume through advanced purchase commitments any head of state is going to think about i have to protect my people that's the natural instinct and that may be true in a normal situation but in a global pandemic you're only as safe as everyone is safe covid19 has turbocharged normal market forces from funding to the speed at which vaccines were developed and the subsequent international scramble to buy them but are there more fundamental ways the virus will change the vaccine market i think the covert 19 pandemic will completely shake up the vaccine market and that's because of these new technologies like messenger rna and viral vectors by accelerating them so fast they've completely shaken up who's on top who has the potential to create the next vaccine the fastest vaccine ever had been four years you know the ebola vaccine was around five years and the fact that this happened in 300 and you know three days is extraordinary the pandemic was an opportunity to prove that mrna or messenger ribonucleic acid technology could work the synthetic mrna delivers instructions to cells in the body to produce the viral protein which stimulates an immune response the success of pfizer biontec and moderna's mrna vaccines mean the technology could be applied to a wide range of other vaccines and drugs the mrna platform we're going to push that to the limit and we should get a lot more vaccines and you know malaria vaccine or an hiv vaccine or a tb vaccine are miraculous things that's measured in saving millions of lives not some economic thing that is about life itself the speed at which mrna vaccines can be tweaked to respond to new variants and then mass-produced could also make vaccines more profitable we're going to end up having technologies like mrna enabling new vaccines that are going to be you know best in class and first-in-class that's going to be able to maintain kind of a high profitability i think platform technologies are the future of vaccine development and messenger rna is one of them we haven't really seen messenger rna vaccines widely used at all before 2020 and in the last year they've gone from being something of a niche research area into having massive impact i believe we will end up at having the vaccine that will have a combination of the seasonal boost for flu and the new variant for for sasko v2 there's going to be one shot so how is that going to compete with a vaccine not only the seasonal flu i believe those vaccines will have no future there are also reasons to be cautious about the future of mrna just because mrna and the viral vector vaccines have been pretty successful for covert doesn't mean they're going to be successful for everything else and so i think that there will still be a debate inside some of these big vaccine players like gsk sanofi and merck about to what extent they should rush towards this new shiny object and to what extent they should rely on their own reliable proprietary platforms you know i do think for the next pandemic we will be able to solve the problems of the mrna platform that is we'll fix the thermal stability we'll fix the scalability and will fix uh the cost we kind of caught mrna halfway to prime time analysts predict that 2021 vaccine sales from moderna and novovax will outpace those from three of the biggest vaccine producers who dominated the market before covet 19 merck gsk and sanofi all three have yet to bring a coven-19 vaccine to market new players in charge they've got a lot of capital investors are really backing them and they can go into new markets most obviously flu the big question the billion dollar question is you know how many of those firms are going to find a business model that allows them to scale up production and global distribution could the pandemic propel the vaccine segment into becoming a much bigger part of the global pharmaceutical market vaccines probably save more lives than any other tool if we can take vaccines and apply them more in the area of cancer then that just changes the numbers completely because the cancer market you know is it's you know over 10 times the r d over 10 times the spend uh you know potential for growth i do not think that we're going to see the entire pharma industry switch to focusing on vaccines it's still a business where you often sell to governments where they're often very large contracts and not that much competition and not that much growth with more than 113 million cases of coronavirus confirmed globally and 2.5 million known deaths vaccines are widely seen as the key to ending the pandemic public investment in vaccines are dwarfed by the economic costs of this global health crisis an estimated six trillion dollars in economic output was lost in 2020 and another 4.4 trillion dollars will be lost this year public health experts have been telling governments and politicians for years that vaccine supply is a huge global strategic priority and that you should protect it i think they've finally woken up traditionally when governments have tried to invest in that infrastructure it's not worked out very well it's always been the private players in the private sector that's been able to succeed scale up because of the entrepreneurship and freedom that a private sector company would have obviously if you want to have manufacturing facilities ready to go that are there in case of an outbreak you're going to need to make sure that there's financing for that because from a for-profit company the idea that you would have facilities that are available that are not being optimally used might not make business sense but they may make public health sense so i see this as a partnership between government and the private sector i'm very enthused that vaccines all the standby capacity that we will have on for the next pandemic we may be able to use that when there's not a pandemic going on to create lots of low-cost supply capacity for the entire world and you know imagine that you'd had a vaccine you know back in the summer you would have saved millions of lives coven 19 has already changed the vaccine market potentially irreversibly you

Channel: Financial Times

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Id: 0BuCt2vtVjc

Length: 24min 1sec (1441 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 10 2021