50e per dosis would be a great price, until you find out someone else already got much better price for the same thing from the same company. Hint: US pays ~16 EUR, and US is the one that usually overpays healthcare.
Price is dependent on delivery time. You want Fast Shipping on Amazon? You have to pay. You want large volume of Vaccine within a time frame? You have to paid more.
I am still surprised most people around the world, inclusive of those in purchasing and procurement, fail to understand the time and value proposition in the equation. Entrepreneur or Business man tends to be far better at it.
I think a price minimum can be inferred by e.g. looking at economic decrease via GDP. Theoretically you could invest as much money as is the opportunity cost of not being vaccinated.
In Germany that opportunity cost after 3 months of lockdown is huge.
Sure, but if they payed the higher price, almost everybody would be asking why they payed so much, when others did not.
Not everyone can see all the benefits, but anyone can compare two numbers.
They seriously should have just auctioned off doses. Have someone take the political heat for it, but with people bidding up doses like Hamilton tickets, you can bet distribution would have been better, there would be only one specific complaint about "fairness," and the price would signal that it's desirable.
Weird how many people are defending this price when it's clear they sold it to everyone else for 1/3 the cost.
How is this not just an obvious example of profiteering? Yeah they made something valuable, they should be rewarded, but also people are dying.
Plus they are going to be making money from this for YEARS. No-one thinks Covid can be eradicated, we're going to be buying an annual vaccine from these companies for the foreseeable future - this is why AstraZeneca were happy making no profit now - they know they'll make some money eventually.
Also another thing to bear in mind - one of the purposes of their new RNA vaccine tech was to make vaccines CHEAPER.
There are a lot of comments here, that imply (or I think they imply) that had the EU decided to pay the much higher price, production and deployment would be much higher. Is there any factual basis to this, or would we just be in approximately the same situation, but paying more?
Maybe they would take the dosis from US and sell them in EU for more (LOL).
Or, take the excess 40e and pay someone a fortune to build few more factories overnight (ROFL).
I think everybody knows where the excess profit goes, but, if they could deliver really immediatelly, I think EU would pay it, the same way as Isreal (probably) did. But EU has a 'bit' more citizens than Israel...
So we'll have 3-5 months of lockdowns because we haggled for 30 Euro, which would be 18B to vaccinate the whole EU. The losses for the economy will be way higher than this... :/
People are implying the haggling was connected to the delay, but it wasn't necessarily. As an example the UK contract with AZ had the same limitations as the EU one (this just came yesterday) https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/17/europe/uk-astrazeneca-vaccine...
We in the EU should have temporarily nationalized Pfizer/Biontech and force them to give up the formula and manufacturing process.
We should have done the same to all pharma capable of manufacturing the vaccine.
We are in a state of war..This is no game.We have ordered hundreds of millions of people to suspend their lives and hundreds of thousands are dying.
Talk about killing the goose that lays the golden egg. That would have put back pharma in the EU for a generation at least, and in the next pandemic, the vaccine companies would not have even talked to the EU.
If we had paid 1000 GBP per vaccine in the UK, I struggle to see how it would have not been the greatest value for money purchase that will have been made within my entire lifetime.
We're in the middle of a three month period of it being illegal for anyone to visit my home...
If I didn't screw up the math that would be ~7% of UK's 2020 GDP and around 60% of the GDP loss in 2020 compared to 2019. It would be really expensive but the scale of what's happening is also huge.
So maybe not the greatest value for money in a lifetime as there are plenty of much cheaper things with better returns, but at this scale of cost you're probably right.
This is a normal thing in any negotiation in the real world.
The first price you get is high, specially if the thing in question has never been done before.
When things have never been done before, real prices at the end tend to be higher than expected.
Bureaucrats can expect things to be perfect, because they live in a perfect world of the already known. But when you work with uncertainty and chaos like spaceX new rockets or RNA vaccines you don't really know everything and need to fail in order to explore.
So far, RNA vaccines have been a tremendous success, they are faster and cheaper to produce, but they have never been used on humans before, and never before vaccination has been applied at such global scale.
What a ridiculous frame from Tagesschau and whoever is syndicating this news too.
As a German, I'd have happily paid 50€ or 100x more to receive a vaccination as soon as possible.
And then as a country, I'd be happy to pay that price too as it'd allow me to profit long-term by opening my economy that has been suffering from the crysis.
The EU has messed up vaccinations and now there needs to be consequences. Why do we even allow governments to handle the distribution of such a rare good when we all know they're too incompetent to do so? Markets exist for a reason.
You've already given them a lot of money. The German government gave BioNtech $445 million dollars in a grant last year alone. It's not unreasonable to be concerned that a small number of pharma companies are trying to generate massive profits when they basically have the entire world hostage.
Nothing bad with pharma solving covid, but surely something bad with pharma solving covid using public money and then not releasing the solution to the public without taking another big fee. (Hypothetically — I’m not saying that’s what happened since I know so little. I’m pointing out a scenario in which pharma would be bad.)
And, I would suggest more broadly that profit doesn’t equate with “morally good”. One could argue that under utilitarianism, the ethically “right” thing to do is to give away vaccines, or at least charge only the manufacturing price. Hell, even a dollar per vaccine across even 50% of the world’s population is a ton of money.
Your type of reasoning is the exact problem that we have in politics.
Single people think they know better than this genius swarm intelligence that is the market. And then they make stupid rules for everyone.
It doesn't matter what is good or bad. Right or wrong. Only the outcome matters. And arguably given the content of the original post, the outcome right now with politics is bad.
The truth is pharma companies had them over a barrel and took advantage of it. For all these years scientists were alerting politicians and the public in general the risk of a pandemic was very real and demanded more attention and resources but were not heard, and now that it came to pass countries do not have any other choice but to pay twice; for the development and for the product.
So sure, in an ideal world, with a population that respected science and not belittled scientists, better prepared countries would have had the advantage to negotiate better pricing because they would have been expecting it. Sadly we do not live in that world.
The consumer surplus on vaccines is so incredibly large that it's all just a silly discussion. Pfizer making $40 of profit (or whatever) on a vaccine worth thousands of dollars just isn't interesting.
Higher prices make it harder for lower income countries, but you are claiming it's offensive that they would capture any of the value of the product, even in places where the 'high' price is not an issue.
That's the point of the system, to give the vaccines to the people who run the biggest risks (elderly, healthcare workers who spend a lot of time in proximity to infected, etc), rather than to whoever's the richest. Especially considering that being rich already makes it a lot easier to minimize your risks (typically have jobs that are easier to take home, better access to private transportation, can afford to not work for a while in the worst case).
