Pfizer Q4 earnings: Pfizer has plundered health systems for profit, campaigners say
Pfizer Q4 earnings: Pfizer has plundered health systems for profit, campaigners say
Release date: 31 January 2023
Responding to Pfizer’s Q4 earnings, Julia Kosgei, Policy Co-Lead for the People’s Vaccine Alliance, said:
“In one year alone, Pfizer’s revenue has exceeded the total health expenditure of more than 100 countries combined. If it were a country, Pfizer would sit in the wealthiest third of nation-states. And it has amassed this fortune while jacking up prices on COVID-19 vaccines amid a pandemic that has devastated people’s livelihoods. Put simply, Pfizer has plundered health systems for profit.
“Billions of people in developing countries still cannot access affordable COVID-19 medicines. Companies like Pfizer are gobbling up ever-greater proportions of health budgets and handing the spoils to wealthy shareholders – all while treating access for developing countries as little more than a PR initiative. We cannot go on like this.
“This week, the WHO will reveal the ‘zero draft’ of a pandemic treaty. Governments must use this opportunity to stand up to the pandemic profiteers and demand that, in a health emergency, public health comes before private profit.”
/Ends
Notes for editors
This is a reaction to Pfizer’s Q4 earnings announcement: https://investors.pfizer.com/Investors/News/news-details/2023/PFIZER-REPORTS-RECORD-FULL-YEAR-2022-RESULTS-AND-PROVIDES-FULL-YEAR-2023-FINANCIAL-GUIDANCE/default.aspx
According to the World Health Organization Global Health Expenditure Database, the combined health expenditure of the bottom 108 countries equalled $97 billion (2020 figures): https://apps.who.int/nha/database
Pfizer’s $100.3bn in revenue would place it 63rd of 190 in Worldometer’s ranking of countries by GDP, within the top third: https://www.worldometers.info/gdp/gdp-by-country/
Experts have estimated that Pfizer’s vaccine costs just $1.18 per dose to make ( Oxfam analysis of studies of mRNA production techniques, carried out by Public Citizen with engineers at Imperial College). Charging $130 per dose, as Pfizer has suggested, would represent a markup of more than 10,000%.
Media contact
Joe Karp-Sawey, Senior Media Advisor, People’s Vaccine Alliance