Deleted tweet shows Europe paying less for many vaccines

The European Union is paying less money than the United States for a range of coronavirus vaccines, including the PfizerBioNTech inoculation currently being rolled out across the country, according to a Washington Post comparison of the breakdowns.

The costs to the E.U. had been confidential until a Belgian official tweeted — and then deleted — a list late Thursday.

Comparing that list to calculations by Bernstein Research, an analysis and investment firm, it appears the 27-nation union has a 24 percent discount on the Pfizer vaccine compared to the United States, paying $14.76 per dose compared to $19.50 in the United States. Some of the difference may reflect that the E.U. subsidized that vaccine’s development and the cost of shipping the European-made vaccine across the Atlantic.

The bloc will pay 45 percent less than the United States for the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine currently under development. But it will pay 20 percent more than the United States for the Moderna vaccine, which is expected to be approved for U.S. use on Friday. Both of those vaccines were funded partly by the U.S. government as part of Operation Warp Speed, an effort to expedite their development. The AstraZenecaOxford team received $1.2 billion, and Modern a got $4.1 billion.

As in the United States, European countries generally plan to make the vaccines free for their citizens.

The per-dose prices of the vaccines are lower than most brandname drugs, but the hundreds of millions of doses required to vaccinate entire populations will drive up costs significantly for individual countries. Disparities between the higher prices in the United States and Europe in overall drug prices have long driven outrage in Congress.

Asked about the price differences between the United States and Europe, Pfizer noted that the European Union purchase, 200 million doses, was double that of the United States.

“Pfizer and BioNTech are using a tiered pricing formula based on volume and delivery dates,” Pfizer said in a statement. “The agreement with the European Commission for the supply of 200m doses, and an option to request an additional 100m, represents the largest initial order of our candidate vaccine to date.”

It said it would not disclose further details.

Operation Warp Speed said that it had negotiated extensively with each drug manufacturer.

A spokesman for the European Commission, which negotiated the contracts for the vaccines on behalf of E.U. members, declined to comment about the pricing, other than to say disclosure was a breach of confidentiality clauses of the contracts.

The Belgian official, State Secretary for Budget Eva De Bleeker, posted the table of Belgium’s costs for vaccines on Twitter on Thursday, then deleted it shortly afterward. Because the European Union has negotiated collectively for vaccines on behalf of its members, the same prices apply across all of its 27 nations.

A spokesman for De Bleeker confirmed the authenticity of the tweet, and said that it came after a Thursday evening discussion in the Belgian Parliament and opposition charges that there was no money to pay for the vaccines in the country’s 2021 budget.