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by djsumdog 2009 days ago
Well hundreds of millions have already flowed into every major pharma company for development costs, so the price for tax payers in every contributing country is substantially higher than $40/person. That's just the price an individual may see.
4 comments

You're kidding right? The whole operation "Warp Speed" was a bit over $10 billion, that is a pittance compared to the trillions spent to keep the economy from collapsing.
It’s fun to shit on Big Pharma but this isn’t true.

Pfizer specifically rejected government funding. It did so because it didn’t want to be dragged into bureaucracy.

Biontech, Pfizer's research partner, received 375 million Euro from the German government.

https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/themen/themenseite-fo...

That is true, and likely one of the reasons for that favorable EU deal.

But what's also correct is: neither Pfizer nor BioNTech did accept money from the Trump government (except as payment for the finished product once it was approved of course), which is what the OP probably meant. There's a huge difference regarding the potential for politicization between this particular government and any other sane government on this planet, and especially the German one that's currently being led by a trained physicist.

No, that's (roughly) the per dose price the US is paying for the vaccine (there's no individual fee here for the vaccine, I guess there can be an administrative fee, but that won't go to the manufacturer, it will go to the health provider doing the vaccination).
Did you mean hundreds of billions? Hundreds of millions is a tiny amount relative to the billions of doses under production.

Hundreds of billions is not accurate either though.