Declining numbers of infections are causing even African countries, most of which still have low vaccination rates, to refrain from ordering additional vaccines against Covid-19. A high need for depreciation is announced in the vaccine manufacturing industry.
There is no longer a shortage of vaccines from the manufacturer Moderna – quite the opposite.
It has been just over a year since politicians around the world clamored for vaccine doses. In Switzerland, representatives of the FDP shaped mid-March 2021 the term «vaccination gate» – so great was the outrage that the federal government had allegedly failed to accept the offer from the manufacturer Lonza to set up a production line reserved for Switzerland. Lonza works as a contract manufacturer for the US vaccine supplier Moderna, which is now confronted with completely different challenges.
Moderna’s experience is that poor countries, of all people, which were at the bottom of last year’s run on the vaccine against Covid-19 because of their modest financial strength, don’t want to know anything more about further deliveries. The African Union, which represents the interests of 55 African countries, declined to exercise an option to purchase an additional 60 million doses in the second quarter. At the same time, the Covax purchasing group, which is financed by Western investors and procures vaccines for third-world countries worldwide, announced to Moderna that it would forgo 166 million doses each for the third and fourth quarters.
These setbacks have the stock price caused the once highly acclaimed company to collapse by a further 6 percent. Compared to the all-time high of last August, the stock market value of Moderna has fallen by three.
Like its two main competitors, Biontech and Pfizer, Moderna is struggling with the fact that there are now large overcapacities. Industry-wide an estimated 12 billion doses per year produce, but who still needs them in view of the falling infection rates in most countries? Large write-downs on plants are on the horizon, unless a problematic new variant of the virus emerges and the race for cans starts again.