It would be bold of the blog to claim that the case for booster jabs for Covid may be related to the profits that are to be made. Who are we to challenge the humanitarian motives of the pharmaceutical corporations?
The drug companies Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna are poised to make billions of dollars from Covid-19 booster jabs this autumn, with analysts estimating that sales could rival the $6bn-a-year market for seasonal flu vaccines.
Moderna, Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech have already inked more than $72bn (£52bn) in sales for this year alone, in deals for supplying follow-up shots and also the initial two doses for those being inoculated for the first time in less wealthy countries.
Analysts have forecast revenue of more than $6.6bn for the Pfizer/BioNTech shot and $7.6bn for Moderna in 2023, mostly from booster sales.
They expect the annual market to settle at about $5bn or higher eventually, with additional drugmakers competing for those sales.
They are likely to include Maryland-based Novavax, which has just struck a deal with the EU to supply up to 200m doses of its vaccine, which is yet to be approved by the EU’s drugs regulator. France’s Sanofi and the UK drugmaker GSK are also working on a vaccine, which they hope will be ready by the end of the year. Britain’s AstraZeneca and the US firm Johnson & Johnson are collecting more data on boosters of their vaccines. New jabs from Novavax, Sanofi and Germany’s CureVac could also be used as boosters, assuming they are approved by regulators.
Damien Conover, a healthcare analyst, said: “A lot of these firms aren’t even in the market yet. I think within a year’s time, all these companies will have booster strategies.”
The market value of Nasdaq-listed BioNTech, which was a small German drug developer before the pandemic, has soared to $92bn, catapulting it into the top 10 most valuable German companies.
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