49Bloomberg Businessweek March 8, 2021
Pfizer has supplied 95 million doses globally. It’s executing on
one of the most ambitious scale-ups in pharmaceutical history
to meet the relentless demand, boosting production to 2 billion
doses in 2021—more than it has agreements to sell at this stage. It
expects the vaccine to generate at least $15 billion in revenue in
2021, putting it—under the brand name Comirnaty, an ungainly
blend of “Covid,” “mRNA,” and “immunity”—on track to be one
of the biggest-selling drugs in the world.
There’s no rulebook for how a global corporation should
behave during a pandemic. Pfizer accomplished something
extraordinary, exceeding nearly everyone’s hopes, and is now
doing what pharma does: mass-marketing lifesaving products
at prices the market is willing to pay. It’s not bound to serve a
global public-health agenda. All that said, there will one day be
an autopsy of the pandemic, and a central question might be
how a single company came to hold such power over so many.
I n May 2020 the Trump administration announced the
launch of Operation Warp Speed. Moncef Slaoui, a for-
mer GlaxoSmithKline Plc executive, joined as chief
adviser to OWS to figure out which vaccines to back. He had
an uncommon familiarity with mRNA technology from serving
on the board of Moderna Inc., which had spent years research-
ing the platform. No drug using mRNA technology had ever
been approved.
Slaoui knew Pfizer might be a contender after it announced
its decision to collaborate with BioNTech, another mRNA pio-
neer, but he didn’t know Bourla. When they first spoke, in June
2020, Bourla made it clear he wasn’t interested in taking money
for research and development as the other companies OWS was
evaluating were. Instead, he wanted an advance purchase order
from OWS to guarantee a buyer if Pfizer succeeded. The compa-
ny’s $50 billion in annual revenue meant it could afford to take a
flier. Bourla has said it wasn’t an easy decision, but he felt it lib-
erated scientists from bureaucracy to get faster results. “Albert
was very clear that they had what it takes to deliver,” Slaoui says.
Pfizer’s confidence showed early on. It began marketing
the vaccine globally in May, soon after it started safety test-
ing. “The process started in the very early days when we
reached out to every single country,” Bourla says. “We started
discussions in all continents of the world.” The U.K. was the
first country to do a deal, agreeing on July 20 to buy 30 mil-
lion doses (later upped to 40 million) to be delivered in 2020
and 2021. As with most of Pfizer’s deals with individual coun-
tries, the terms were not disclosed.
Two days later, Pfizer announced a $1.95 billion order from
Operation Warp Speed for 100 million doses, pending authori-
zation of its vaccine from the Food and Drug Administration.
The straight advance-purchase order set Pfizer apart from
all the other OWS candidates. Moderna, for example, got
$2.48 billion from the U.S. government, including $955 million
for clinical development and manufacturing and payment for
100 million doses. By contrast, Pfizer has spent $2 billion of its
own money on development. Company executives came out
of the gate asking for a higher price per dose than the $19.50
they eventually agreed on, according to former senior admin-
istration officials who declined to be named because the dis-
cussions were confidential.
Higher prices were floated in Europe, too. Last summer,
Pfizer and BioNTech started off asking for €54 ($65) a dose in
negotiations with the EU, a person familiar with the talks says,
confirming German media reports. BioNTech co-founder Ugur
Sahin told Bild that initial ballpark figures were based on rough
calculations of production costs before they figured out how
the manufacturing would work. They later settled on a range
of €15 to €30 a dose for “industrialized countries,” depend-
ing on order size.
Free from the strings attached by a government grant, Pfizer
could move faster. “We made the early decision to begin clinical
work and large-scale manufacturing at our own risk to ensure
that product would be available immediately if our clinical trials
prove successful,” Bourla said when announcing the U.S. deal.
Less than a week after securing the U.S. contract, Pfizer started
its final-stage trial, saying it aimed to seek regulatory review
by the FDA as early as October. Moderna started its final trial
the same day, but a longer interval between doses—28 days to
Pfizer’s 21—meant that, all other things being equal, Pfizer was
positioned to report results first.
The orders kept rolling in. A few days after the trial started,
Japan ordered 120 million doses to be delivered in the first half
of 2021. In early August, Canada made a deal.
In late August, Pfizer shared early data showing that partici-
pants generated a strong immune response to the vaccine, and
even more countries got in line. In early September the com-
pany agreed to “potentially supply” the EU with as many as
300 million doses, but the bloc dragged its feet on finalizing the
deal. The Gulf state of Qatar placed an order a few weeks later.
Bourla had been consistently saying the company
expected to report results from the final-stage trial by the
end of October, which Trump seized on as he sagged in the
polls in the homestretch of his reelection campaign. “We’re
going to have a vaccine very soon. Maybe even before a very
special date,” Trump said in early September. Concern that
Pfizer was rushing the trial at the expense of safety checks
mounted. Pushing back at the perception that the Trump
administration was pressuring the company, Bourla prom-
ised to make safety paramount. “I wanted to speak directly
to the billions of people, millions of businesses, and hun-
dreds of governments around the world that are investing
their hopes in a safe and effective Covid-19 vaccine,” hePfizer executives found a partial
fix to their supply problem
in the vaccine vials themselves.
They just needed authorization
to say the vials contained
six doses instead of five