 The COVID pandemic has been pretty miserable for almost everyone, but one sector of society who definitely made the best of it a big farmer. This is an industry which was famous for price gouging during the AIDS crisis and getting millions of Americans hooked on opioids. It's now associated with the one tool capable of getting us out of the worst public health crisis in a century. COVID-19 vaccines. Companies like Pfizer and Moderna of course are not only doing this for PR to be associated with vaccines that rescue us from this pandemic, they're also making tidy profits from the sale of them. And it looks as if those profits are only going to keep on rising. That's because as the FT report both firms have this summer jacked up their prices. So the paper reports that Pfizer raised the price of its COVID-19 vaccine by more than a quarter and Moderna by more than a tenth in the latest EU supply contracts as Europe battled supply disruptions and concerns about side effects from rival products. Groups are set to generate tens of billions of dollars in revenue this year as they sign new deals with countries anxious to secure supplies for potential booster shots in the face of the spread of the highly infectious Delta coronavirus. They go on to write the new prize for a Pfizer shot was 1950 euros against 1550 previously according to portions of the contracts seen by the Financial Times. The price of a Moderna jab was $25.50 a dose. The contract show up from what people familiar with the matter said was about 19 euros which is $22.60 in the first procurement deal but lower than a previously agreed $28.50 because the order had grown according to one official close to negotiation. So it's that Moderna vaccine which is the most expensive but Pfizer well still expensive and only getting more so. The companies are able to command such high prices because they are the only two mRNA vaccines currently on the market and it's those mRNA vaccines that have proven to be the most desirable technology for the countries that can afford them in a few experiments or a few studies they've been shown to be more effective than the other vaccines on the market and having fewer side effects. You'll know all about AstraZeneca and that problem with blood clots for younger recipients of it obviously very very rare. We can see here the effect of that desirability of the mRNA vaccine in terms of revenue forecast for 2022. The FT is suggesting that those mRNA vaccines are expected to have a revenue of $85 billion of course they're more expensive so that doesn't necessarily mean more vaccines in total in contrast the viral vector vaccine so that includes AstraZeneca Johnson and Johnson and Sputnik are expected to generate $30 billion in revenue during 2022. Of course when it comes to countries like the UK when it comes to regions such as the EU or the USA governments are more than happy to pay these prices basically because lockdowns cost a hell of a lot more than $85 billion the bigger problem here I mean actually I shouldn't say that's not a big problem because we did fund them through public investment we are paying twice for them that's kind of annoying but it's manageable it's a much bigger problem for poor nations who can't afford them essentially they're not getting they can't afford those prices. What Pfizer say in response is they say look these high prices we charge these are actually only for those rich countries that afford them in fact because we charge these high prices in the west we're able to charge lower prices in the developing world and the chief executive of Pfizer told the FT that they would be providing jabs to middle-income countries at half price and to the developing world or to poorer countries low-income countries at cost that might sound good that might sound reassuring until you realise they aren't selling any vaccines to those low-income countries or not very many at all again we've got another graphic from the Financial Times you can see here that to high-income countries where they're selling vaccines at full price Pfizer have sold over $2 billion and to low income countries you see Pfizer here is that sort of royal blue to low income countries Pfizer have sold less than 200 million so say oh it's so generous we'll sell them at cost to the developing world we'll sell them at full price to the rich world but then they only sell them to the rich world so they only sell them at full price I say only obviously they are selling some to low-income countries but not very many. Ash this is a pretty neat trick isn't it you say don't worry we're going to charge low prices to poor people and then you don't sell any to poor people I mean look it's a way of managing some of the political fallout particularly around this issue of well I'll try that again particularly around this issue of intellectual property rights whilst also not having to do very much which is going to at the end of the day harm your profit margin and what this is resulting in is in some areas of the world dangerously low levels of vaccine coverage so when you look at the amount of vaccine bought up by North America by wealthy European countries you've got enough to cover the population you know not just once over but one and a bit times over so it's like 114 percent for Europe and I think maybe even 120 percent for North America you start comparing that to poorer countries to certain regions in Africa and it's as low as two three four five six percent right so you have this huge difference in available vaccine for those populations and look one the argument against that is that it's just inhumane profit shouldn't be put above people's lives the fact that intellectual property rights have been maintained at the expense of countries poorer countries being able to manufacture generic versions of this vaccine technology is of course a complete abomination right it is offensive to the notion of human dignity and that there are some things which are more important than making money but two if you have unvaccinated spots in the world well you increase the likelihood of the emergence of variants which ultimately endanger the efforts to lift lockdown restrictions over here in a rich country like ours so no matter what way you look at it even if it's from a purely selfish and self-centred perspective this is stupid it's not something which has got a long term or even medium term of view in mind but ultimately companies like Pfizer are able to behave in this way because of the relative weakness of governments if Pfizer if we wanted Pfizer to behave differently it would make it much more difficult for them to price gouge and restrict sales to poorer countries but we don't and I think what's what's become really really apparent over the past few months especially because at the beginning of the year when lots of people were saying we need to release the patents I think you should release the patents anyway but there was an argument to say that wouldn't solve the problem because the problem is actually the capacity that the world currently has there aren't that many factories which are currently going idle and so even if you release the patents they wouldn't necessarily be the capacity to make that many more vaccines on a very short time frame I think what the last few months have shown is that even if opening the patents wouldn't allow that many new vaccines to be created on a really short time frame even if it was in an 18 month time frame like there are many countries given the amount of boosters we're having given the amount of problems that different vaccine production outlets are having what this pandemic has shown once and for all is that telling developing countries to rely on the goodwill of the west and to rely on the goodwill of big pharma is completely for the birds Africa has been told we're going to provide you this many millions of vaccines via COVAX and none of them have arrived right some of them arrived but very few of them have arrived and that's because the factory which is in in India understandably they've said we're going to use all of those vaccines in India because we've got you know such a big problem and then Pfizer only want to sell their vaccines to to the countries where they can charge super high prices and AstraZeneca have had its own problems but basically what you need is you need to have an infrastructure in these countries so that they can rely on themselves because relying on the west is just not it's not working at this point in time obviously we should you know that takes a while we should just be giving billions and billions of vaccines to all the countries in the world but this idea that sort of like the liberal ruling class will will save sub-Saharan Africa has just been proven false in this situation now I mean I mean look you're completely right and not only is it a load of bollocks it also I think shows the model of crisis management that we're going to see as the climate emergency deepens so what we're seeing is that there is a thin veneer of western philanthropy which fits with our idea of what our place in the world is of oh look at you you poor abject melanated people we'll give you some scraps off of our table and our you know huge big pharma conglomerates you know our governments could feel really good about themselves and say we're doing enough to help these you know poor unfortunate souls whereas actually what's going on is that the reason why we're so relatively well insulated when it comes to vaccines is because it's built on a model of exploitation price gouging and also moving intellectual property and advances in technology which were developed in the public sector into private hands so actually you can't separate off the relative level of privilege though but also does mean a certain amount of vulnerability to predatory pricing mechanisms imposed by private companies but you can't really separate that from what's going on in the rest of the world now if countries like ours were to push forward with say with socializing lots of this technology and saying we're obviously going to put distribution and manufacturing over and above the ability to generate a profit while not only would it be cheaper for our government so it would also be better for the rest of the world but there's an ideological opposition to doing that so what we're seeing is a form of vaccine nationalism of course you know buy up all the stuff for richer countries and then we'll just give the crumbs off the table to the poorer ones and it is precisely this kind of model I think that we're going to see with the climate emergency which is we insulate ourselves through technology through our ability to fund infrastructure very quickly and for the rest of the world not only will we neglect our duty in terms of our contribution to emissions through outsourcing emissions right through buying from countries which aren't decarbonizing at the same rate as our country is but when dealing and looking at the kind of human cost of that particular kind of emergency we'll go well there's not much we can do to help you beyond this kind of quite you know flimsy and insulting level of philanthropy so what we'll do is we'll put our borders up and I think that it's you know we've talked a lot about borders on the show Michael and I'm with you I don't think that it's reasonable to have a full open borders approach to pandemic management you do have to restrict some levels of travel from hotspots to populations which have got low case rates however I think that looking at it also as a way of dealing with an inequality that a rich country has had a hand in shaping that's obviously not the politics that either of us would subscribe to but also it's immoral and it's deeply wrong but I think it is also something we're going to see as the climate emergency deepens we cause the problem we make it harder for poor countries to fix the problem and then our solution to the movements of people and human suffering is to put the borders up