Thanks to its vaccine, which was quickly validated, the American laboratory Pfizer expects to achieve 15 billion dollars in sales and comfortable profits.
Nicolas Barré takes stock of a current economic issue.
Thanks to its anti-Covid vaccine, the American laboratory Pfizer expects to achieve 15 billion dollars in sales and comfortable profits.
$ 15 billion in sales on a single product is what pharmaceutical labs call a "blockbuster".
In this case, at this level, it will probably be one of the biggest in the history of this industry.
A profitable blockbuster since this vaccine, sold for 19.5 dollars per dose in the United States, should allow Pfizer and the German biotech BioNTech which developed it, to generate a pre-tax margin of around four billion dollars a year. dollars.
Significant profits, because opposite, research is expensive.
Pfizer, for example, invests nine billion dollars a year in research and development.
Sanofi, for comparison, spends six billion euros, or more than seven billion dollars, on research.
So yes, these profits are vital to maintain the research effort of the big labs and we sometimes tend to forget it, even to criticize it, which is absurd and ends up being very expensive.
The French experience over the past twenty years is enlightening.
In the 1990s and until 2008, France was the leading European producer of medicines.
We are now only 4th, behind Switzerland, Germany and Italy.
French factories only produce 22% of the drugs reimbursed by the Social Security, everything else is imported.
We even produce only 17% of hospital medicines and, before the Covid crisis, only a quarter of our vaccine needs.
Why this dropout?
Firstly, because the reduction in drug prices has been given priority over industrial policy.
To save money for the Social Security, the social security financing law sets the amount of drug expenditure each year and therefore limits the turnover of the pharmaceutical industry.
In 2019, the year before the Covid crisis, the law imposed a drop in the price of drugs of 900 million euros and these restrictions, necessarily, then weigh on the investments of the laboratories.
While in our European neighbors, the growth of the turnover of the drug industry is of the order of 3 to 4% per year, with us, it is capped at less than 1% because of the efforts demanded on the prices.
But the result, we are paying today: less profits, less investments, more relocations.
This is all that the Covid crisis prompts us to urgently review.
If we don't want to drop out for good.