In just over a year, the covid vaccine has become Pfizer's main source of income.
The pharmaceutical giant announced this Tuesday that it achieved 13.2 billion dollars (about 12.5 billion euros) in revenue in the first quarter of 2022 thanks to Comirnaty, the vaccine it developed together with BionTech.
That represents more than half of the 25,661 million dollars that Pfizer invoiced in those three months.
In the first quarter of 2021, when covid vaccines began to be widely administered to deal with the pandemic, Pfizer had revenues of about 3,000 million dollars from their manufacture and sale.
With the spread of the vaccine to more and more age groups, approval in more countries, and booster shots, sales have skyrocketed.
Added to that is another $1.5 billion in revenue generated in the first quarter by Paxlovid, Pfizer's pill for those who have already contracted the disease, which was approved late last year.
Thanks to the huge revenue generated by those two products, Pfizer's first-quarter sales soared 77% and profits grew 61% to $7.864 billion.
Investors, however, do not think it is enough.
On the one hand, trials have shown that Paxlovid is not effective as a preventive treatment (a much juicier business than the cure).
On the other hand, the sales data for both products closed for the whole of 2022 (32,000 million dollars for the vaccine and another 22,000 million for the pill) remain below what analysts expected.
The New York-based pharmaceutical company has maintained its global revenue forecast for the full year of between 98,000 and 102,000 million dollars, of which more than half will be contributed by its products against covid.
Pfizer expects those products to continue to deliver strong revenue throughout the decade.
The rise of anti-pandemic products has made it possible to absorb the collapse of sales of Champix, which was the best-selling medicine to stop smoking.
Regulators and the company withdrew the product due to the presence of a carcinogenic compound in the pills.
Pfizer's revenue from Champix is down 99% in the first quarter.
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