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The
charity, Doctors Without Borders, or Médecins Sans Frontières, has called on
GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer to drop the price of the pneumococcal vaccine to US$5
per child in the most impoverished countries. Doctors
Without Borders has released a new report blasting two top pharmaceutical
companies for inflated costs of vital vaccines that have proved too steep for
poor nations, recommending they adjust prices in order to save lives.
RT.com reports the
vaccine protects young children against 12 diseases, including sepsis,
bacterial meningitis, and pneumonia. Worldwide, pneumococcal disease kills
about a million children a year, the group said.
The
international medical aid organization said in the report that the cost of
vaccinating children in the world’s poorest countries is now 68 times higher
than in 2001. Pneumococcal vaccines currently account for 45 percent of that
price jump, the report noted.
"A
handful of big pharmaceutical companies are overcharging donors and developing
countries for vaccines that already earn them billions of dollars in wealthy
countries," said Rohit Malpani, policy and analysis
director for organization’s access campaign.
Hospitals
in Tunisia pay about US$67 for the pneumococcal vaccine, The Guardian reported,
while hospitals in France pay about US$58.
“We
have an irrational situation where some developing countries like Morocco and
Tunisia are paying more for the pneumococcal vaccine than France does,”
said Kate Elder, vaccines policy adviser for Doctors Without Borders’ access
campaign.
“Because
of the astronomical cost of new vaccines, many governments are facing tough
choices about which deadly diseases they can afford to protect their children
against.”
The
report was released ahead of an international vaccination donor conference in
Berlin at the end of January.
“Donors
will be asked to put an additional US$7.5 billion dollars on the table to pay
for vaccines in poor countries for the next five years, with over one third of
that going to pay for one vaccine alone, the high-priced pneumococcal vaccine,”
Malpani said.
“Just
think of how much further taxpayer money could go to vaccinate more children if
vaccines were cheaper. We think it’s time for GSK and Pfizer to do their part
to make vaccines more affordable for countries in the long term, because the
discounts the companies are offering today are just not good enough.”
GlaxoSmithKline
responded in a statement that the price it charges poorer nations for its
pneumococcal shot, Synflorix - "one of the most complex we've ever
manufactured” - is barely covering costs.
"Many
of our available vaccines are advanced and complex and require significant
upfront capital investment to make and supply,"
the company said, according to Reuters. It added that discounting vaccines
would threaten the company’s ability to supply them over the long run.
Pfizer,
meanwhile, said its own pneumococcal shot, Prevenar 13, was too complex to
tinker with prices.
"It
takes more than two years to create one batch of Prevenar 13, encompassing some
500 separate quality control tests...multiple facilities and hundreds of
trained professionals," Pfizer said in a
statement.
The
report said GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer had together reported more than US$19
billion in worldwide sales of pneumococcal vaccines.
“We need to put public
health before profit -- life-saving vaccines for children shouldn’t be big
business in poor countries,” Elder said. “In one
week, donors will gather in Berlin to pledge more money for vaccination, so
we’re asking GSK and Pfizer to hurry up and cut the price of the pneumococcal
vaccine before then.”
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