Moderna CEO Stephan Bancel on Monday hit back at criticism of the company’s plans to raise the price of its mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine by 400%, citing the billions of federal dollars the company has received. He argued that the money did little to develop a vaccine.
Speaking at the Wall Street Journal Health Forum, Mr. Bancel said that the development of the vaccine was due to private investors and that federal funding simply hastened the development, and that whatever happened. The comment was in response to the question of whether there is a “moral duty” to give back to taxpayers who have helped develop life-saving immunizations. It probably won’t raise the price of vaccines dramatically as they move from federal distribution to commercialization. market this year.
The government recently paid $26 per dose for an updated booster dose of Moderna, but the company plans to increase the price of the shot from $110 to $130 per dose.
“The platform was funded by private investors. The platform was not funded by the government,” Bancel argued. And I think they got a lot of value out of it — to accelerate the development of a vaccine — we would have funded it,” he said. The company also “has not received a penny” from the government to support manufacturing, he added.
Amid the pandemic, Moderna received nearly $10 billion in federal funding to develop, test and deliver vaccines to the U.S. population. This includes approximately $1.7 billion agreed with the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) in April 2020 to support late-stage clinical development. The company generates about $36 billion in vaccine sales worldwide, according to the New York Times.
But federal support for profitable vaccines began before the pandemic. Moderna developed the vaccine with federal researchers at the National Institutes of Health. Moderna, in 2016, partnered with the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to create a general design for an mRNA vaccine. Moderna paid the NIH $400 million in December to borrow molecular technology developed by NIH researchers to design its own vaccine.
The NIH is currently in a bitter patent dispute with Moderna after Moderna intentionally excluded three NIAID researchers from its main vaccine patent.
Bancel’s comments are sure to piss off critics. And they came just two weeks before a congressional hearing by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee on the proposed vaccine price hike. “Taxpayers paid billions for it: So why would Moderna consider quadrupling the price of the COVID vaccine?” Bancel agreed to testify.
