Pfizer will charge $110 to $130 for a dose of its COVID-19 vaccine once the U.S. government stops buying the shots, but the drugmaker says it expects many people will continue receiving it for free.
Pfizer executives said the commercial pricing for adult doses could start early next year, depending on when the government phases out its program of buying and distributing the shots.
The drugmaker said it expects that people with private health insurance or coverage through public programs like Medicare or Medicaid will pay nothing. The Affordable Care Act requires insurers to cover many recommended vaccines without charging any out-of-pocket expenses.
A spokesman said the company also has an income-based assistance program that helps eligible U.S. residents with no insurance to get the shots.
A Pfizer executive said Thursday that the price reflects increased costs for switching to single-dose vials and commercial distribution. The executive, Angela Lukin, said the price was well below the thresholds “for what would be considered a highly effective vaccine.”
Pfizer’s two-shot vaccine debuted in late 2020 and is easily the most common preventive shot that has been used to fight COVID-19 in the U.S.
More than 375 million doses of the original vaccine, which Pfizer developed with the German drugmaker BioNTech, have been distributed in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
That doesn’t count another 12 million doses of an updated booster that was approved earlier this year.
The vaccine brought in $36.78 billion in revenue last year for Pfizer and was the drugmaker’s top-selling product.
Analysts predict that it will rack up another $32 billion this year, according to FactSet. But they also expect sales to fall rapidly after that.
More than 90% of the adult U.S. population has already received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine, according to the CDC. But only about half that population has also received a booster dose.
___
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
As China’s ruling Communist Party holds a congress this week, many Beijing residents are focused on an issue not on the formal agenda: Will the end of the meeting bring an easing of the at times draconian “zero-COVID” policies that are disrupting lives and the economy?
It appears to be wishful thinking. As the world moves to a post-pandemic lifestyle, many across China have resigned themselves to lining up several times a week for COVID-19 tests, restrictions on their travels to other regions, and the ever-present possibility of a community lockdown.
“There is nothing we can do,” Zhang Yiming, 51, said this week at a park in Beijing. “If we look at the situation abroad, like the United States where over 1 million people have died, right? In China, although it is true that some aspects of our life are not convenient, such as travel and economy, it seems that there is no good solution.”
People are looking to the party congress, which ends Saturday, for two reasons. The meeting, which is held every five years and sets the national agenda for the next five, can send signals of possible changes in policy direction.
Secondly, authorities always tighten controls — COVID-19 and otherwise — before and during a major event to try to eliminate disruptions or distractions, so they could relax controls when the event ends.
Any hopes for an easing, though, appear to have been dashed before the congress. The Communist Party’s newspaper, the People’s Daily, published a series of opinion pieces on the effectiveness of China’s “zero-COVID” approach, and health officials said last week China must stick with it.
China’s leader, Xi Jinping, praised the policy at the opening ceremony of the congress. He said it had prioritized and protected people’s health and safety and made a “tremendous achievement in striking the balance between epidemic response and economic and social development.”
After an initial outbreak in early 2020 that killed more than 4,000 people and overflowed hospitals and morgues, China was largely successful in taming the virus while other countries were overwhelmed with it — a contrast trumpeted in Communist Party propaganda.
Then came omicron in late 2021. China had to employ ever more widespread restrictions to control the faster-spreading variant, locking down entire cites and starting regular testing of practically the entire population of 1.4 billion people.
The measures have bred simmering discontent, fed by instances of harsh enforcement that in some cases had tragic consequences.
During a two-month lockdown of Shanghai last spring, videos widely shared on social media showed officials breaking down apartment doors to drag unwilling residents to quarantine facilities. Children were also separated from their parents, because one or the other was infected.
Instances of hospitals denying treatment because of pandemic rules sparked outrage, including a woman in labor who lost her baby after she wasn’t allowed into a hospital during a lockdown of the city of Xi’an because she couldn’t show a negative COVID-19 test result.
While public protests are relatively rare in China, some people took to the streets in Shanghai and Dandong to protest harsh and prolonged lockdowns.
Last week, three days before the congress opened, banners were flung over an elevated roadway calling for Xi’s overthrow and an end to the “zero-COVID” policy. The incident spilled over into at least one other city, where photos shared on Twitter showed similar statements posted on a bus stop in the city of Xi’an.
Andy Chen, senior analyst at Trivium China, a Beijing-headquartered policy consultancy, said restrictions beyond the party congress should come as no surprise.
“All the conditions that have forced the government to put zero-COVID in place haven’t really changed,” he said, singling out the lack of an effective vaccine and the absence of sound home quarantine rules.
Even though vaccines are widely available, China’s homegrown versions don’t work as well as the Pfizer, Moderna and other shots developed elsewhere. China also has resisted vaccine mandates, keeping down vaccination rates. As of mid-October, 90% had received two shots, but only 57% had a booster shot.
Beijing authorities have doubled down on the hardline coronavirus policies during the congress.
Highway checkpoints into the city are heavily policed, with all entrants required to show a “green” code on a mobile phone app to prove they haven’t traveled to medium or high-risk areas.
Some express commuter bus lines between Beijing and neighboring Tianjin city and Hebei province have been suspended since Oct. 12.
Anyone who has been in a city, district, or neighborhood where even one case of coronavirus has been found within seven days is banned from entering the Chinese capital.
Within the city, the daily lives of residents are dictated by their health codes. They must use an app to scan the QR code of any facility they enter to show their status and log their whereabouts.
Without a green code and a negative coronavirus test result within 72 hours, people are not allowed into office buildings, shopping malls, restaurants and other public places. The policy means most of Beijing’s 21 million-plus residents take a coronavirus test at least two to three times a week.
And there is always the risk of a sudden lockdown. Officials in hazmat suits guarded entries to gated communities this week in Fengtai district, where five neighborhoods have been categorized as high-risk. Residents were not allowed to leave their compounds, and some shops were forced to close.
While the party congress has not provided the watershed moment that some have been hoping for, it may turn out to be the point at which the government begins to lay the groundwork for a long process of loosening restrictions, said Dr. Yanzhong Huang, director of the Center for Global Health Studies at Seton Hall University and an expert on public health in China.
Some factors suggest the government will be in no rush to open up, including a broad acceptance of the policy among those who are inconvenienced but have not experienced prolonged or repeated lockdowns.
“The vast, vast majority of the population goes on with their lives, unaffected, and that’s a much better policy from the government perspective to implement than, for example, forcing a vaccine mandate through the population,” Chen said.
But Huang noted signs of social instability, especially among the middle class and urban residents.
“I think the question is whether it has reached a tipping point that people really find this is not acceptable anymore,” he said. “We cannot tolerate that anymore. It remains to be seen even in the large cities, you know, how people are willing to tolerate draconian measures.”
___
Ji reported from Bangkok. Associated Press video producers Olivia Zhang and Wayne Zhang contributed.
Total Doses Distributed = 882,774,235. Total Doses Administered = 632,905,664. Number of People Receiving 1 or More Doses = 265,591,330. Number of People Fully Vaccinated = 226,594,560.
COVID-19 shots should be added to the lists of recommended vaccinations for kids and adults, a panel of U.S. vaccine experts said Thursday.
The panel’s unanimous decision has no immediate effect — COVID-19 shots already are recommended for virtually all Americans. Rather, it would put the shots on the annually updated, formal lists of what vaccinations doctors should be routinely offering to their patients, alongside shots for polio, measles and hepatitis.
The expert panel’s decisions are almost always adopted by the CDC director and then sent to doctors as part of the government’s advice on how to prevent disease.
State and local officials often look to the lists in making decisions about vaccination requirements for school attendance, but local officials don’t always adopt every recommendation. Flu and HPV shots, for example, aren’t required by many schools.
Usually, vaccines placed on the schedules are fully licensed, but that has not yet happened for every COVID-19 vaccine product in every age group.
COVID-19 shots initially were approved under emergency authorization measures starting in late 2020. Over time, the government has licensed many of the shots, but full approval has not yet happened for booster doses or for shots for kids younger than 12. Because the shots have already been recommended under emergency authorization for Americans older than 6 months, however, the decision makes no real difference, federal officials say.
Earlier this week, the same expert panel voted unanimously to add COVID-19 shots to a program that provides vaccines at no cost to children who might not otherwise be vaccinated. This is in preparation for the day in the future when the federal government transitions out of paying for all COVID-19 shots, as it has been doing.
___
The Associated Press Health & Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
U.S. regulators on Wednesday authorized a booster dose of the COVID-19 vaccine made by Novavax.
The Food and Drug Administration said the new booster option is for people 18 and older who can’t get the updated omicron-targeting Pfizer or Moderna boosters for medical or accessibility reasons — or who otherwise would not receive a COVID-19 booster shot at all.
The FDA specified the additional Novavax shot was to be used as a first booster — not for people who’ve already had one or more booster doses already — at least six months after completing their primary shots.
Novavax’s initial two-dose shots have been available since the summer. Novavax is a protein-based vaccine unlike the other COVID-19 vaccines available in the U.S. including Pfizer, Moderna or Johnson & Johnson.
About 48 percent of Americans who received their primary vaccinations have never received that all-important first booster.
“Offering another vaccine choice may help increase COVID-19 booster vaccination rates for these adults,” said Novavax CEO Stanley Erck in a statement.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also signed off on the decision after the FDA.
U.S. health officials have been encouraging Americans to get those updated Pfizer and Moderna boosters to bolster protection against the most common omicron strains ahead of an expected winter surge.
The new Novavax booster is made with that company’s original formula; it still is testing an omicron-targeted recipe.
___
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
COVID-19 drove a dramatic increase in the number of women who died from pregnancy or childbirth complications in the U.S. last year, a crisis that has disproportionately claimed Black and Hispanic women as victims, according to a report released Wednesday..
It finds that pregnancy-related deaths have spiked nearly 80% since 2018, with COVID-19 being a factor in a quarter of the 1,178 deaths reported last year. The percentage of preterm and low birthweight babies also went up last year, after holding steady for years. And more pregnant or postpartum women are reporting symptoms of depression.
“We were already in the middle of a crisis with maternal mortality in our country,” said Karen Tabb Dina, a maternal health researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “This really shows that COVID-19 has exacerbated that crisis to rates that we, as a country, are not able to handle.”
The nonpartisan U.S. Government Accountability Office, which authored the report, analyzed pregnancy-related deaths after Congress mandated that it review maternal health outcomes in the 2020 coronavirus relief bill.
Mental health issues likely contributed to the increase in pregnancy-related deaths, Tabb Dina said. Many women who experience depression and anxiety during or after their pregnancy struggle to get the care they need.
“Mental health is the greatest complication in pregnancy that we don’t understand,” she said.
The biggest spike in deaths came during July through December of last year, as the COVID-19 delta variant infected millions, noted Carolyn Yocom, a director at the Government Accountability Office.
“It’s really clear from the data that the time in which the delta variant spread seemed to correspond to a huge increase in deaths,” Yocom said.
The maternal death rate is particularly stark for Black women, who have long faced worse maternal outcomes than their peers.
Pregnancy-related deaths for every 100,000 births climbed from 44 in 2019 to 68.9 among Black women last year. White women had death rates of 26.1 last year, a jump from 17.9 in 2019.
Death rates among Hispanics had been on the decline, but they swelled again during the pandemic from 12.6 per 100,000 in 2019 to 27.5 last year.
Long before COVID-19 began spreading, the stage was set for Black, low-income and rural women to receive subpar pregnancy care — putting them at further risk for their pregnancies to go wrong, according to a separate GAO report.
More than half of rural counties didn’t have a hospital offering pregnancy care as of 2018, the review found.
“The loss of hospital-based obstetric services in rural areas is associated with increases in out-of-hospital births and pre-term births, which may contribute to poor maternal and infant outcomes,” the report found.
