THEhe health crisis has made at least one clear winner. The Pfizer group now plans to sell $ 36 billion (31 billion euros) of its vaccine in 2021. With 2.3 billion copies sold, it will then be the best-selling drug in one year of the entire history of the pharmaceutical industry.
The American, associated with the German laboratory BioNTech, has crushed the competition. Its market share, which was already around 50% in the spring in the United States, now exceeds 70% across the Atlantic, and even 80% in Europe. As we say in American high-tech jargon, “ the winner takes all ”, the winner takes it all.
Shocking as such a commercial performance, built on a health tragedy may seem, it also bears the mark of unprecedented scientific, industrial and political success: the development, marketing and administration of a vaccine in only a year and a half, when it took ten times as long before. With, as a result, millions of lives saved.
Technological rupture
The success of Pfizer over its many competitors is primarily due to the combination of a good product and flawless industrial and logistical execution. The American, who would never have been able to develop a totally innovative product so quickly in his laboratories, has been able to trust a young growth stemming from German research. He brought his science to clinical trials, negotiating with authorities, making and shipping a product that was very complex to keep.
For decades, major pharmaceutical companies have quietly left the doomed vaccine sector
None of this was won. For decades, the big pharmaceutical companies have quietly left the cursed sector of vaccines: products that are complex to develop, risky and unpopular because they are likely to make healthy people sick, bought in large quantities by governments which weigh on prices, without recurrence. sales and whose primary market is often poor and insolvent countries.
This is the reason why the malaria vaccine is still in limbo, why GSK had to abandon its Lyme disease product, just like Sanofi with dengue, and why Novavax was ruined by decades of fruitless research. . The situation could change, thanks to the technological breakthrough in messenger RNA and the recurrence of epidemics like that of Covid-19 which could require regular injections, or even annual. Pasteur’s return behind the Pfizer billions.