Pharma majors slash vaccine prices to poorest countries

Several pharmaceutical majors, including the UK’s GlaxoSmithKline (LSE: GSK), US giants Merck & Co (NYSE: MRK) and Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ) and France’s Sanofi (Euronext: SAN) have agreed to cut prices for their vaccines in the developing world through the international public/private partnership, the GAVI Alliance.

Merck said that, in the spirit of the GAVI Pledging Conference for Immunization, which takes place June 13, it is furthering its long-standing commitment to GAVI by providing Gardasil (human papillomavirus quadrivalent [types 6, 11, 16, and 18] vaccine, recombinant) to the GAVI Alliance at a price of $5.00 per dose. This is lower than that in the lowest tier of Merck’s established pricing policy and takes into account a country's ability to pay and burden of unmet health needs in the population, the company says. Merck will also offer RotaTeq (rotavirus vaccine, live, oral, pentavalent) to UNICEF at $5.00 per dose. The RotaTeq price will decrease to $3.50 once the purchase volume increases to 30 million doses.

GSK will offer to supply up to 125 million doses of its rotavirus vaccine Rotarix over five years to developing countries at an approximate 95% reduction to Western market price. GSK announced that it has made a new offer to supply Rotarix to the GAVI Alliance at $2.50 per dose, as part of the company’s efforts to increase access to its medicines and vaccines in the world’s poorest countries. It is estimated that more than half a million children die of rotavirus gastroenteritis each year - the equivalent of a child a minute worldwide - and it is responsible for the hospitalization of millions more.