POLICY BRIEF - The Great Vaccine Robbery - Pharmaceutical corporations charge excessive prices for COVID-19 vaccines

High prices are also directly contributing to extreme vaccine scarcity in the global south – without the budgets needed to compete with rich country buyers, low- and middle-income countries and the COVAX facility have been pushed to the back of the vaccine queue. [...] Yet these vaccines are some of the most expensive on the market at an average price of $16.25 and between $19.209 and $24 per dose respectively.10 Based on computational process modelling, the expert analysts estimate that setting up regional hubs to transfer the successful technology and manufacture 8 billion doses of the mRNA vaccines in one year would cost $22.8 billion for the The People’s Vac. [...] The privatization and monopolisation of the vaccine science and technology, the profiteering by pharmaceutical corporations and the unforgiveable behaviour of rich country governments are all responsible for today’s vaccine scarcity and vaccine inequality. [...] The international community cannot revisit the bad decisions, the compromises, the hoarding, and the enabling of greed, of the last eighteen months. [...] But as infection and death rates rise in parts of the world least able to access vaccines it is incumbent on governments to not only learn from the mistakes of the last eighteen months, but to learn from the successes of the last two decades.