PIt’s easy to come back to Earth when you’ve been around the stars. Yesterday they were the saviors of the world and now must submit to the contingencies of daily affairs. The pharmaceutical laboratories Pfizer and BioNTech together have flooded the planet with their doses of vaccine against Covid-19, they must now cut back.
Pfizer thought that in 2023 nearly a quarter of Americans would be vaccinated, only 17% have done so. The federal government, which had ordered 24 million of its Paxlovid curative treatment against the disease, asked the laboratory to take back half of it. As a result, the group must lower its sales forecasts for the current year by almost 9 billion dollars (8.5 billion euros). It should only garner “only” 60 billion dollars in turnover, compared to more than 100 billion in 2022.
Its German partner, the company BioNTech, which developed the revolutionary vaccine technology based on messenger RNA, is suffering the repercussions. It announced on Monday October 16 that it would have to write down 900 million euros of inventory, taking into account the drop in orders.
Fall on the stock market
Citizens, governments and investors are now looking elsewhere. Since the peaks of 2021, Pfizer’s stock price has fallen by 44%, that of BioNTech by 70% and that of Moderna, the other winner of the crisis, by almost 80%. And that’s nothing compared to those who arrived too late on this ephemeral market. The American Novavax, which has nevertheless obtained an American order but is still waiting for the European one, saw its action collapse by 97%.
This story helps us understand why most pharmaceutical laboratories have turned away from this very unpredictable and versatile profession of vaccines. There is never enough when the crisis arrives, we hear fine speeches about sovereignty and the insufficiency of industrialists, and we move on to something else when the storm has passed.
Pfizer has nothing to worry about, its product portfolio is one of the richest in the world. He has used the money earned over the past two years to acquire new biotech start-ups and is targeting another worth more than $40 billion.
For BioNTech and Moderna, it is more complicated. They have both been working for years on the application of messenger RNA to cancer treatments, but are still far from commercialization. The health crisis has plunged them into the deep end of large-scale industrial development. Now they have the hardest thing to do: to last.