Doctors Without Borders rejects pneumonia vaccine donation from Pfizer

Non-profit organisation Doctors Without Borders/ Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has rejected pharma company, Pfizer’s offer to a donate a significant number of pneumonia vaccines (PCV) to aid the children they serve.

The announcement comes from Jason Cone, executive director of Doctors Without Borders in the United States.

Whilst many would expect the offer to be a solely generous act, Cone argues that donations can involve multiple rules and conditions that can negatively affect vaccination campaigns. Donations from pharmaceutical companies can often include restrictions on which patient populations and what geographic areas are allowed to receive the benefits.  

Cone further states that donations can undermine efforts to increase access to affordable vaccines and also deter new manufacturers from entering the market. The need for new manufacturers is needed, Cone says, to bring overall prices down for the pneumonia vaccine. He warns that donations can be used as justification for why prices remain so high for humanitarian organisations and developing countries.

In fact, a report published earlier this year stated that because of the high prices of new vaccines, low and middle-income countries had the lowest coverage of vaccinations. Echoing this statement at the World Health Assembly last summer, 60 countries spoke out against the high prices of vaccines, regarding it as the biggest culprit for the prevalence of killer diseases.

The aforementioned statements highlight the need for cheaper vaccines so developing countries and humanitarian organisations can afford them. Pneumonia is estimated to kill up to 1 million children a year, marking it as the world deadliest disease among children.

Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) are the only two producers of the vaccine and are therefore able to control the market, earning a total of $36 billion from the vaccine. MSF have petitioned for years with the companies to lower the price of the vaccine, but were offered donations instead.

There’s little information regarding the consistent market price of PCV but reports state that the cost of the vaccine is 68 times higher than it was a decade ago. Data of Pfizer’s vaccine indicates that pricing can range from US $3.30 per dose to US $116.91 per dose. It takes three doses to fully vaccinate a child.

It isn’t just MSF who is concerned about donations. The Word Health Organisation’s (WHO) guidelines on donations state how contributions of high priced vaccines can influence the market and suppress competition. Other concerns include the quality of donations, limited shelf-life and encouraged black market sales through the stockpiling of donated medicines.

However, steps have been made towards making the vaccine more affordable, with GSK announcing this year that it would offer its pneumonia vaccine to humanitarian organisations at the lowest global price (currently $3.05 per dose or $9.15 per child for all three doses).   

The step is a significant one but Cone argues that without a pricing concession from Pfizer, a sustainable solution for the pneumonia vaccine won’t be possible for the millions of children who are living without protection against the disease.