Big Pharma went public after US announcement to suspend COVID-19 vaccine patents

The decision of the United States to support a the temporary lifting of patents on COVID vaccines “is disappointing”, the International Federation of the Pharmaceutical Industry (IFPMA) said on Wednesday, after companies suffered a sharp drop in their valuation on the stock market.

“We fully agree with the goal that covid-19 vaccines are distributed quickly and fairly around the world. But as we have repeatedly said, a suspension is the simple but incorrect answer to a complex problem, ”the pharmaceutical lobby group said in a statement.

In a statement, the United States Trade Representative, Katherine Tai, explained that Washington “strongly” believes in the protection of intellectual property, but considers it necessary to increase vaccine production to end the pandemic in the world.

“We are in a global health crisis and we need extraordinary measures,” Tai said.

Joe Biden’s government decision comes after days of intense debate within the administration, which has come under pressure from some of the US pharmaceutical giants who oppose the measure.

Fall of pharmaceutical companies

Shares of pharmaceutical companies with covid-19 vaccines like Pfizer and BioNTech, Moderna or Novavax fell sharply on Wednesday after the announcement that the United States.

Immediately after the news broke, the the securities of these companies collapsed in the market, although they subsequently managed to partially overcome lows marked before the end of the trading session on Wall Street.

Modern, which for most of the day had seen slight advances, closed with a decline of 6.19%, Novavax lost 4.94% and the German BioNTech 3.45% had remained.

Pfizer, the German laboratory’s ally in the vaccine, also fell sharply at first, but managed to regain the green and ended the session with a minimum lead of 0.05%, far from the price he had scored for a good part of the day.

The American group, precisely, had published the day before an afStrong increase in your profits in the first quarter of the year through sales of the covid-19 vaccine, which has already become their main source of income. Pfizer got around $ 3.5 billion from its vaccine between January and March and said over the year as a whole it expected to make around $ 26 billion based on contracts signed so far .

Johnson & Johnson, which also markets a vaccine against the coronavirus and which was already sailing in red during the session, was not affected in the same way by the announcement of the US government, but ended in a drop of 0.42% .

In recent months, the WTO has been the scene of tensions between an Indian-led bloc and South Africa, which has proposed temporarily remove intellectual property protections from Covid-19 vaccines, and world powers.

In a session held on the same Wednesday, the Director-General of the WTO, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said equitable access to vaccines, diagnostics and treatment is “the moral and economic issue of our time”. The World Health Organization said in April that of the 700 million vaccines administered worldwide, only 0.2% were administered in low-income countries.

With information from AFP and EFE

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