Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has begun petitioning Moderna against a price increase on its Covid vaccine from $26 to $130. Moderna announced the price hike last week as Covid vaccines shift to the commercial market.

WILLIAM LAZONICK; william.lazonick@gmail.com 
    Lazonick is a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts and co-founder and president of the Academic-Industry Research Network.

Sanders noted that Moderna’s Covid vaccine costs $2.85 to produce. Lazonick told the Institute for Public Accuracy: “Moderna has made a bonanza off of a global public health crisis. What more do they want? This story is about greed. We can see [based on the price of Moderna’s stock value in the past two years] that they didn’t take a hit at $20 a dose,” which is the price at which the drug is currently set. Further, the National Institutes for Health “in effect gave Moderna the vaccine. They’ve already gauged us. The message they’re now sending is that they were giving us a gift when the price was $20 a dose––a price at which they still made massive profits and received government subsidies. Why should one company capture all that value? Decades of research, much of it publicly funded, ended up in that vaccine.”

He added: “It wasn’t a gift. They made out like bandits from it.” 

Now that Moderna and Pfizer have announced a new price range, Lazonick added, “I believe we shouldn’t negotiate, we should regulate. Congress needs to act––for instance, by passing a law that says that in a public health crisis, the government gets to set the price.”