Profits Not Lives

Doctors Without Borders (or Medecins Sans Frontieres) has released a new report criticizing two top pharmaceutical companies for inflated costs of vital vaccines that have proved too steep for poor nations, recommending they adjust prices in order to save lives. The charityhas called on GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer to drop the price of the pneumococcal vaccine to $5 per child in the most impoverished countries. The vaccine protects young children against 12 diseases, including sepsis, bacterial meningitis, and pneumonia. Worldwide, pneumococcal disease kills about a million children a year, the group said.

The international medical aid organization said in the report that the cost of vaccinating children in the world’s poorest countries is now 68 times higher than in 2001. Pneumococcal vaccines currently account for 45 percent of that price jump, the report noted. Hospitals in Tunisia pay about $67 for the pneumococcal vaccine while hospitals in France pay about $58.

"A handful of big pharmaceutical companies are overcharging donors and developing countries for vaccines that already earn them billions of dollars in wealthy countries," said Rohit Malpani, policy and analysis director for organization’s access campaign. “Donors will be asked to put an additional $7.5 billion dollars on the table to pay for vaccines in poor countries for the next five years, with over one third of that going to pay for one vaccine alone, the high-priced pneumococcal vaccine. Just think of how much further taxpayer money could go to vaccinate more children if vaccines were cheaper. We think it’s time for GSK and Pfizer to do their part to make vaccines more affordable for countries in the long term, because the discounts the companies are offering today are just not good enough.”

Kate Elder, vaccines policy adviser for Doctors Without Borders’ access campaign said  “Because of the astronomical cost of new vaccines, many governments are facing tough choices about which deadly diseases they can afford to protect their children against. We need to put public health before profit -- life-saving vaccines for children shouldn’t be big business in poor countries.”

GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer had together reported more than $19 billion in worldwide sales of pneumococcal vaccines.