Politician tweeted list showing how much the EU has agreed to pay for major vaccines, confirming rumors of Moderna’s sky-high price tag

• A Belgian politician tweeted a list on Friday showing how much the EU has agreed to pay major drugmakers for doses of their vaccines.

• Eva De Bleeker, state secretary for the budget of Belgium, has been criticized for breach of confidentiality and said it was “a mistake on the part of the communications team”.

• De Bleeker deleted the tweet, but screenshots show the cheapest for the EU is AstraZeneca, at $ 2.18 a dose, while the most expensive is Moderna, at 22.06 $ per dose.

• “We wanted to offer full transparency, but we were a bit too generous”, a spokesperson for De Bleeker told the Brussels Times.

• Visit the Business Insider homepage for more stories.

A Belgian politician has revealed how much the EU will pay for doses of major vaccines, validating predictions that Moderna’s vaccine will be the most expensive.

Belgian Budget Secretary Eva De Bleeker tweeted a list on Friday showing how much the EU was paying per dose for six of the main treatments, as well as how many units the government had ordered.

De Bleeker quickly deleted the tweet, but not before local media could post screenshots.

De Bleeker was criticized for breaching confidentiality, and blamed the blunder on “an error on the part of the communications team”, Belgian media HLN reported.

Here is the price list shared by De Bleeker:

• University of Oxford and AstraZeneca: $ 2.18 (1.78 euro)

• Johnson & Johnson: $ 10.42 (8.50 euros)

• Sanofi and Glaxo Smith Klein: $ 9.27 (7.56 euros)

• Pfizer and BioNTech: $ 14.71 (12 euros)

• CureVac: $ 12.26 (10 euros)

• Modern: $ 22.06 (18 euros)

Business Insider has reached out to drugmakers for feedback. Moderna said in August that she expected her vaccine to be the most expensive of those in development.

De Bleeker tweeted the list amid a dispute with a right-wing opposition party, which claimed the government had not set aside enough funds to buy enough vaccines, the Brussels Times reported.

The story continues

Belgium is buying 33.5 million vaccines at a cost of 279 million euros, the screenshot shared by De Bleeker shows.

“We wanted to provide full transparency, but we were a little too generous,” a De Bleeker spokesperson told The Times. “Technically these prices shouldn’t have been published, so we deleted the tweet.”

On Friday, a spokesperson for the European Commission said: “We cannot say anything about this case, everything about vaccines and prices is covered by confidentiality clauses, in the interest of society and also in the interest of the current negotiations “, according to the guard.

EU vaccine prices revealed by De Bleeker will differ from the cost paid by the US and Canada.

In some cases, the European price may reflect the amount of funding that companies have received from EU authorities.

For example, the EU appears to pay 24% less for injections of the Pfizer vaccine compared to the United States, the Guardian reported, citing an analysis by Bernstein Research. The EU has provided significant funding to BioNTech, which developed the vaccine for Pfizer.

Likewise, the US is paying $ 4 a dose for the vaccine produced by AstraZeneca and developed in Oxford, UK, while the EU will pay $ 2.18 (€ 1.78), Bernstein said.

Moderna’s vaccine, developed in Massachusetts, has received $ 2.5 billion in funding from the White House and will cost 20% more in Europe, the Guardian said.

It costs $ 15 in the US, but $ 18 in Europe.

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