There is a secret clause in the agreement between the government and Pfizer over the Covid vaccine supply. Large portions of the government's contracts with the company over the supply of 189m vaccine doses have been redacted.
Pfizer is accused by a former senior US health official of "war profiteering" during the Pandemic. Tom Frieden, who was director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under Barack Obama, said in a Channel 4 Dispatches investigation that vaccine manufacturers are war profiteers if they focus on maximizing their profits.
Public Citizen, a US consumer advocacy organisation which has examined Pfizer's global vaccine contracts, said there is a wall of secrecy surrounding these contracts and it's unacceptable.
The UK had agreed to secret proceedings. It is the only high-income country that has agreed to this provision. It allows pharmaceutical companies to avoid domestic legal processes.
Drug firms have been allowed by the UK government to make decisions. How did we end up in a situation where a few drug firms were able to exert so much control over the most powerful governments in the world? It points to a broken system.
Pfizer has won praise for its vaccine delivery programme, but the US multinational faces scrutiny over the scale of its profits and the proportion of doses it has delivered to low-income countries.
Pfizer wanted to make money during the Pandemic and wanted to sell its vaccine at a loss. Comirnaty is the brand name for the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, which will be one of the most lucrative drugs in pharmaceutical history.
The Pfizer vaccine costs just 76p to make according to an analysis by a biological engineering expert. It is being sold to the UK government at a price of over twenty dollars a dose.
Pfizer says its profit margin as a percentage before tax is in the high-20s, even though the manufacturing costs do not include research, distribution and other costs. Pfizer expects to deliver 2.3 billion vaccines this year with revenues of $36 billion.
The Pfizer vaccine costs 76p to make, according to a biological engineering expert. Rafiq Maqbool/AP
A report last month by the People's Vaccine Alliance said Pfizer and other drug firms have left low-income countries out in the cold by selling the majority of doses to rich countries. Only 2% of people in low-income countries have been fully protected against coronaviruses. Intellectual property rights for Covid-19 vaccines should be suspended by drug firms.
Pfizer has faced increased scrutiny after it was announced that it would receive up to 350m from the German government to fund vaccine development.
Anna Marriott is the health policy manager for Oxfam and she said that it was "deplorable" that billions of people around the world were being denied vaccines so that pharmaceutical companies could make obscene profits. It's incomprehensible that pharma monopolies are prioritised over people's lives, given that public investment was crucial to vaccine development.
Pfizer has pledged 40 million doses of vaccine to Covax, a UN-backed initiative delivering vaccines for low income countries. This is less than 2% of its global production. The firm says it will deliver two billion doses to low- and middle-income countries by the end of the year.
Pfizer said it was proud to have delivered more than 2 billion vaccines to more than 150 countries. It supplied low-income countries on a not-for-profit price and all other countries were being offered the vaccine at a significantly discounted price.
The company said that the value of a vibrant private sector can deliver to society. Confidentiality agreements are standard practice. The estimated cost of manufacturing the vaccine by a biological engineering expert was grossly inaccurate and meaningless because it did not reflect the true costs of bringing the vaccine to patients, including clinical studies, increased manufacturing efforts and global distribution.
The vaccine contracts of the government were commercially sensitive. A request for comment was not responded to by BioNTech.
Vaccine Wars: The Truth About Pfizer is on Channel 4 at 7:30pm on Friday.
