Moderna rebuked over plan to hike COVID vaccine to $130

NEW YORK

Moderna’s chief executive on March 22 defended the U.S. company’s plan to quadruple the price of its lifesaving COVID vaccine to as much as $130 per dose as soon as government stockpiles run out.

Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders lashed out at the price hike, denouncing the “unprecedented level of corporate greed” in the pharmaceutical industry. “And that is certainly true with Moderna,” Sanders said.

Moderna has so far charged between about $15 and $26 for doses of its vaccine, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

The U.S. government subsidized $1.7 billion of Moderna’s research at the start of the pandemic and then purchased $10 billion worth of vaccine, Sanders said at a Senate hearing where the company’s CEO Stephane Bancel was testifying.

Sanders said Moderna was “thanking the taxpayers of the United States” by more than quadrupling the vaccine’s price “at a time when it costs less than $3 to manufacture.”

Sanders noted several times at the hearing that Moderna conducted buybacks of its own stock and paid its own executives at its Cambridge, Massachusetts, headquarters handsomely.

Bancel defended Moderna, saying the distribution system will change completely when the U.S. government lifts a state of health emergency, perhaps as soon as May.

Up until now, Moderna had only one customer, distributed its vaccine to only a few warehouses and did not have to pay for the cost of expired doses.

The company expects a “90 percent reduction in demand,” Bancel said. “We are losing economies of scale. We must assume the wastage risk and cost that the U.S. government used to assume.”