Moderna’s COVID Vaccine Price Hike Reveals Government’s Failure - The American Prospect

"In late 2021, as Moderna and the National Institutes for Health (NIH) sparred publicly over one of the patents key to the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, activists began charging the NIH with getting “taken advantage of by pharma.” As co-inventor of the vaccine with Moderna, public health experts and advocates on drug pricing said, the U.S. government should better assert itself.

But more than a year later—and more than two since the vaccine’s initial rollout in the U.S.—the government has failed to clarify its role in developing the vaccine, and failed to exercise the power it has to shape the course of the drug’s future.

Given this history, Moderna’s announcement early this month that it would consider a price hike on the vaccine was inevitable. Pfizer and BioNTech had made a similar announcement last October. But Moderna’s proposed quadrupling of the price—from the current $26 per dose to between $110 and $130 per dose—is a stunning 4,000 percent increase from its manufacturing cost of $2.85 per dose. In earlier contracts, the government paid Moderna $15–$16 per dose, offering the vaccine to Americans for free...."