Vaccine makers kept $1.4 billion in prepayments for canceled Covid vaccines for the world's poor

Separately, Johnson & Johnson is seeking additional payment for unwanted shots, according to confidential documents.

As global demand for Covid-19 vaccines dries up, the program tasked with vaccinating the world's poor has been negotiating urgently to try to back out of deals with pharmaceutical companies for injections it doesn't needs more.

Drug companies have so far refused to reimburse $1.4 billion in advance payments for doses now canceled, according to confidential documents obtained by the New York Times.

Gavi, the international immunization organization that purchased the vaccines on behalf of the global Covid vaccine program, Covax, has little publicly talked about the costs of canceling orders. But Gavi's financial records show the organization tried to stem the financial damage. If he cannot strike a better deal with another company, Johnson & Johnson, he may have to pay even more.

Gavi is a non-governmental organization based in Geneva which uses funds from donors, including the US government and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to provide childhood immunizations to low-income countries. At the start of the pandemic, he was tasked with buying Covid vaccines for the developing world - armed with one of the largest humanitarian funding mobilizations ever - and began negotiations with vaccine manufacturers.

These negotiations initially went wrong. The companies initially closed the market organization, prioritizing high-income countries that were able to pay more to lock in early doses. Gavi eventually struck deals with nine manufacturers.

But vaccines didn't start reaching developing countries in large numbers until late 2021. In By the time Gavi had a steady flow of supplies, demand had begun to wane: countries with weak health systems struggled to deliver vaccines, and the dominance of the milder variant of Omicron undermined motivation. people to get vaccinated. Today, Covax is well below the World Health Organization's goal of vaccinating 70% of the population of each country.

Manufacturers of vaccines made more than $13 billion from shots that were distributed via Covax. Under the contracts, the companies are not obligated to return the deposits Gavi made to them to reserve the vaccines that were ultimately cancelled.

But given the number doses of vaccines Gavi has received to cancel, some public health experts have criticized the companies' actions.

Covid vaccine makers 'have a special responsibility' because their products are a societal good and most were developed with public funding, said Thomas Frieden, chief executive of global health nonprofit Resolve to Save Lives and former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. of the United States.

"That's a lot of money that could do a lot of good," he said.

He added that other major global health programs have budgets roughly equal to the amount that vaccine makers are grabbing. "The whole polio eradication effort costs about $1 billion a year, and that's huge infrastructure," he said.

Gavi has reached agreements with Moderna, the Serum Institute of India and several Chinese manufacturers to cancel unnecessary doses, forgoing $700 million in advance payments, according to the documents.

Another pharmaceutical company, Novavax, refuses to reimburse an additional $700 million in advance payments for injections it never delivered.

Gavi had an indirect supply relationship with Pfizer; the Biden administration bought him a billion vaccines to donate through Covax. USA last year