Moderna’s proposed COVID-19 vaccine price hikes have already garnered some raised eyebrows.
Monday, Moderna’s CEO Stephanie Bancel told The Wall Street Journal that the company is considering pricing its vaccine in a $110 to $130 range once the market shifts to commercial distribution.
The statement has already prompted a reaction from the White House, with White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre calling the pricing “hard to justify” at a briefing.
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders also chimed in, sending a letter to Bancel asking the company to halt its planned price increases.
“You propose to make the vaccine unaffordable for the residents of this country who made the production of the vaccine possible,” Sanders wrote. “That is not acceptable.”
The White House shares Sanders’ concern, Jean-Pierre said at the Thursday briefing.
“We do have those concerns as well, and we believe that shot should be affordable,” Jean-Pierre said. “The price hike here is hard to understand or to justify.”
The range Moderna proposed is about eight times its original price in the earliest government contracts for the vaccine and nearly five times the amount the U.S. paid for booster shots last year, which was roughly $27, Sanders cited.
Moderna and Pfizer will have to turn to a private market as government contracts dry up. In September, Moderna laid out scenarios of the market with the shot priced at $100, $82 and $64. Even at the lowest price of $64, the company would be looking at a market worth $8.3 billion, while a $100 shot would rake in $12.9 billion annually.
By comparison, a standard flu shot costs $50, while a quadrivalent or high-dose option would be $95.
After 2022’s third quarter of delayed shot shipments in Europe, Moderna slashed its Spikevax annual sales projection from $21 billion to a range of $18 billion to $19 billion. Third-quarter sales pulled in $3.12 billion for the company in a 35% decrease from the same period in 2021. Meanwhile, Pfizer bumped up its sales projections to $32 billion to $34 billion.