Moderna Inc is planning to price its Covid-19 vaccine candidate at about $50 to $60 per course, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday.
The report said that according to people familiar with the matter, the US pharma company is likely to price its vaccine dose higher than other vaccine makers have agreed to charge governments.
Moderna received additional funding of over $400 million earlier this week from the US government. Overall, the government has poured $1 billion into the vaccine’s development.
The vaccine entered the final stages of trials on Monday and is set to be tested on over 30,000 participants.
Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech which also started its phase 2/3 clinical trials this week had signed a pre-order deal with the US government at $19.50 per dose, FT reported.
AstraZeneca’s vaccine candidate which is another frontrunner in the Covid-19 vaccine race is likely to be priced at $3 to $4 per dose, as per reports.
Moderna, Pfizer, and Merck have previously said that they intend to not sell their vaccine candidates at cost and will make a profit on the vaccine. Meanwhile, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson have said that they will not make a profit from their vaccine candidates.
For instance, AstraZeneca’s vaccine, developed in collaboration with Oxford University, would be priced at less than ₹1,000 per dose in India, partner organisation Serum Institute had said.
“Nobody is going to have to pay for it; we are going to give it to the government, the government will give it free to everyone like other immunisation programmes,” Serum Institute’s CEO Adar C Poonawalla had said as per previous reports.
Moderna is working closely with the US government. The firm said that it must be able to develop 500 million doses a year. This could go up to one billion. Mass production will start in 2021.