Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel has agreed to appear before the HELP committee, chaired by Sen. Sanders
Today, Moderna announced it would start a new program in May to provide the vaccines free to uninsured people
Bernie Sanders calls Moderna CEO to testify on proposed vaccine price hike
The senator plans to use a Senate committee to highlight what he calls a ‘morality crisis’ in the pharmaceutical industry
By Liz Goodwin
February 15, 2023 at 12:26 p.m. EST
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) plans to grill the CEO of Moderna about his reported plans to raise the price of the coronavirus vaccine in a Senate hearing next month that Sanders hopes will convince the company to reverse course.
The hearing will make up a key piece of Sanders’s larger oversight agenda for the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee that he chairs. The former presidential candidate hopes to use his perch on the panel to highlight the “greed” of large pharmaceutical companies in an effort to lower prescription drug prices.
In an interview, Sanders said that Moderna, whose only federally approved drug is the coronavirus vaccine that the company received nearly $2 billion in direct federal money to develop, is a “poster child” for the greed of the pharmaceutical industry. He plans to argue that CEO Stéphane Bancel, who Forbes estimates is worth more than $5 billion, and several other Moderna executives “profited” off the pandemic.
“We’re going to ask them, ‘Hey, you made billions of dollars in profit on a vaccine that was developed because of taxpayer support from the [National Institutes of Health], you’ve become a multibillionaire, and you think it’s appropriate to cost the federal government even more money by quadrupling prices?” Sanders said. “And I hope, I really do hope, that these people will reconsider this outrageous decision and decide not to raise prices for the vaccine.”
Bancel told the Wall Street Journal last month he was considering quadrupling the price of Moderna’s vaccine to as much as $130 per dose once the federal government drains its stockpile and insurers and individuals are responsible for purchasing them on their own. Since the start of the pandemic, the federal government purchased vaccines and provided them free, and Moderna sold its booster shots to the government for about $25 per dose.
➡️ On Wednesday, after its CEO agreed to appear in front of the HELP committee, Moderna announced a new “patient assistance program” to begin this May that will provide millions of uninsured and underinsured Americans the vaccine free of cost. “Everyone in the United States will have access to Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine regardless of their ability to pay,” spokesman Chris Ridley said in a statement.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/02/15/bernie-sanders-calls-moderna-ceo-testify-proposed-vaccine-price-hike/
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