The drug chief of the medical association described the 54.08 euros that Biontech had asked for per dose as too high - especially since the company had received state funding.
Mainz - A dose of the coronavirus vaccine from the manufacturer Pfizer / Biontech should originally have cost 54.08 euros.
According to information from the
NDR
,
WDR
and the
Süddeutsche Zeitung
, it was in the first offer made by the pharmaceutical companies to the EU.
The price would have been more than twenty times as expensive as a dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine.
After intensive negotiations, the final price is said to have been 15.50 euros per dose.
Back in December, a Belgian politician accidentally revealed the prices of various vaccines in a tweet.
Accordingly, the Biontech vaccine only cost twelve euros per dose.
Curevac from Tübingen asked for ten euros, Sanofi from France 7.56 euros and AstraZeneca, the vaccine that is currently making headlines due to potential side effects, only 1.78 euros per dose.
For the drug from the US company Moderna, the overall highest price was given at 18 dollars, for the US company Johnson & Johnson 8.50 dollars.
Coronavirus vaccination: Biontech justified the price based on the benefit
Biontech had advertised the offer as particularly generous.
No other industrialized country in the world has been offered a higher percentage discount.
Biontech also justified the price insofar as it was not based on how much one would have spent on research and development, but on how necessary and useful a new drug is from a medical point of view.
This reasoning is quite common for pharmaceutical companies.
If you think through this calculation to the end, you would have come up with an even higher price, which would be "inappropriate during a global pandemic *", as the media quoted the offer.
According to the media, the chairwoman of the Drug Commission of the German Medical Association, Wolf Dieter Ludwig, said about the offer: "I think the price is dubious."
It now seems understandable that some EU countries were reluctant to use the Biontech vaccine.
With regard to the EU, Ludwig says: "I think it was right to hesitate at such a high price."
Coronavirus vaccine development received government funding.
In addition, the high price was surprising against the background of government subsidies of several hundred million euros that the company Biontech had received since it was founded to set up the company.
In summer 2020, a further 375 million euros from the Federal Ministry of Research followed specifically for mRNA-based vaccine * development.
The other manufacturers of coronavirus vaccines * also received support from various sources with amounts in the millions and billions.
Biontech boss Ugur Sahin did not answer an interview request.
A company spokeswoman merely stated that vaccine prices “depend on various factors”.
It lies “within a certain range for all countries with higher incomes”.
So far, however, the company has not made any profits.
But if you make profits from the sale of the Covid-19 vaccine, you want to "reinvest it in the further development of this technology".
Pfizer relied on confidential agreements and talks with governments.
The EU Commission did not want to do anything either.
* Merkur.de is part of the Ippen-Digital network.