Rather than give away its COVID-19 vaccine, Oxford makes a deal with drugmaker

[NRSKarenRN, BSN, RN]

Philadelphia Inquirer   Kaiser Health News

Rather than give away its COVID-19 vaccine, Oxford makes a deal with drugmaker

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In a business driven by profit, vaccines have a problem. They’re not very profitable — at least not without government subsidies. Pharma companies favor expensive medicines that must be taken repeatedly and generate revenue for years or decades. Vaccines are often given only once or twice. In many parts of the world, established vaccines cost a few dollars a dose or less.

Last year, only four companies were making vaccines for the U.S. market, down from more than 20 in the 1970s....

...Oxford University surprised and pleased advocates of overhauling the vaccine business in April by promising to donate the rights to its promising coronavirus vaccine to any drugmaker.  The idea was to provide medicines preventing or treating COVID-19 at a low cost or free of charge, the British university said...

..A few weeks later, Oxford — urged on by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — reversed course. It signed an exclusive vaccine deal with AstraZeneca that gave the pharmaceutical giant sole rights and no guarantee of low prices — with the less-publicized potential for Oxford to eventually make millions from the deal and win plenty of prestige.

Other companies working on coronavirus vaccines have followed the same line, collecting billions in government grants, hoarding patents, revealing as little as possible about their deals — and planning to charge as much as $37 a dose for potentially hundreds of millions of shots....

..Moderna, another company working on a vaccine candidate, received nearly $1 billion from the U.S. government to pay essentially all costs to research the product and get it approved by regulators. It's using a vaccine designed in large part by the National Institutes of Health and academic scientists using federal grants.

If the vaccine works, the company will get an additional $1.5 billion to cover 100 million doses, a deal that U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, a Texas Democrat, likened to giving taxpayers “the privilege of purchasing that same vaccine that we already paid for.”...

https://www.inquirer.com/business/drugs/oxford-fauci-CDC-vaccines-astrazeneca-merck-pfizer-moderna-coronavirus-pandemic-who-harvard-20200828.html