Both Moderna and Pfizer reported third-quarter financials this week, and it was instantly obvious that the COVID-19 vaccines are huge profit drivers for the companies.
Both Moderna and Pfizer reported third-quarter financials this week, and it was instantly obvious that the COVID-19 vaccines are huge profit drivers for the companies. Pfizer reported $24.1 billion in quarterly revenues overall, with sales of its COVID-19 vaccine with BioNTech, Comirnaty, responsible for $11.1 billion of it. Moderna, whose sole commercial product is its COVID-19 vaccine, with a brand name of Spikevax, reported $5 billion in sales for the quarter.
Pfizer is projecting Comiranty sales for the year of $36 billion, which comes to about 2.3 billion doses of the drug that it expects to deliver in the fiscal year 2021.
“While we are proud of our third quarter financial performance, we are even more proud of what these financial results represent in terms of the positive impact we are having on human lives around the world,” said Albert Bourla, Ph.D., Pfizer’s chairman and chief executive officer. “For example, more than 75% of the revenues we have recorded up through third-quarter 2021 for Comirnaty have come from supplying countries outside the U.S., and we remain on track to achieve our goal of delivering at least two billion doses to low- and middle-income countries by the end of 2022—at least one billion to be delivered this year and one billion next year, with the possibility to increase those deliveries if more are placed by these countries for 2022.”
One billion of the vaccine doses will be sold at a not-for-profit price to the U.S. government, which plans to donate them to the poorest countries.
For the year, Moderna is projecting product sales between $15 billion and $18 billion. They reported that key variables are fewer doses for delivery in 2021, which shifted to early 2022 and prioritizing deliveries to low-income countries through COVAX and African Union. For the year, they expect to deliver 700 million to 800 million doses at the 100-microgram dose.
Stéphane Bancel, chief executive officer of Moderna, stated, “We are humbled to have helped hundreds of millions of people around the world with our COVID-19 vaccine and yet we know our work is not done. We will not rest until our vaccine is available to anyone who needs it, and we are working hard to ensure our vaccine is available in low-income countries with approximately 10% of our 2021 volume and significantly more of our 2022 volume going to low-income countries. It is promising to see the real-world evidence showing that the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine shows sustainably high, durable efficacy.”
For the fiscal year 2021, the two companies together are on track to rake in $51 to $54 billion from COVID-19 vaccines alone. Although it is now looking like booster shots and yearly doses of vaccines will be necessary, overall sales in the future are likely to drop as the pandemic wanes—but not for a while. According to the Financial Times, Airfinity, a health data analytics group, has projected Pfizer will bring in $54.5 billion in 2022 from the vaccine alone, and Moderna will take in $38.7 billion. They project the 2022 global COVID-19 vaccine market at $124 billion.
Johnson & Johnson, the third COVID-19 vaccine player in the U.S., reported their third-quarter results on October 19. Later to the market than Pfizer and Moderna, as well as a single-shot regimen, J&J’s COVID-19 vaccine revenue was $502 million for the third quarter. It’s projecting $2.5 billion in sales for the year.
According to the COVID-19 Vaccine Market Dashboard, 25 COVID-19 vaccines have been authorized globally by at least one national regulatory authority. Seven are in the World Health Organization’s Emergency Use Listing: J&J, Tianjin CanSino, AstraZeneca-University of Oxford, Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, Sinovac, and Sinopharm. Others, such as Bharat Biotech and Russia’s Sputnik V, are still in the process of being evaluated.
The reported price range per dose ranges from $2 to $37, and to date, 19.8 billion doses have been “secured globally.” The COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) has shipped 442.6 million doses to 144 countries, whereas the initiative has secured, optioned, or received donations of 5.09 billion doses of the vaccine.
