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On Friday, a Belgian politician posted on Twitter a list showing how much the EU has agreed to pay major drug manufacturers for their vaccine doses.
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Eva De Bleeker, Belgium’s secretary of state, was criticized for violating confidentiality and said it was “a mistake on the part of the communications team”.
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De Bleeker deleted the tweet, but the screenshots show that the cheapest for the EU is AstraZeneca, with a dose of 2.18 USD, while the most expensive is Moderna, with 22.06 USD per dose.
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“We wanted to provide full transparency, but we were a little too generous,” a De Bleeker spokesman told The Brussels Times.
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A Belgian politician has revealed how much the EU will pay for doses of major vaccines, validating predictions that the Moderna vaccine would be the most expensive.
On Friday, Belgian state secretary of state Eva De Bleeker posted a list on Twitter showing how much the EU paid per dose for six of the main treatments, as well as how many units the government had ordered.
De Bleeker quickly deleted the tweet, but not before local news could take screenshots.
De Bleeker era criticized for breach of confidentiality, and blamed “a mistake on the part of the communication team”, the Belgian HLN press reported.
Here is the price list shared by De Bleeker:
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Oxford University and AstraZeneca: $ 2.18 (1.78 euros)
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Johnson & Johnson: $ 10.42 ($ 8.50)
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Sanofi and Glaxo Smith Klein: $ 9.27 (7.56 euros)
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Pfizer and BioNTech: USD 14.71 (12 euros)
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CureVac: $ 12.26 (10 euros)
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Modern: $ 22.06 (18 euros)
Business Insider contacted the drug manufacturers for comments. Moderna said in August that it expects its vaccine to be the most expensive of the developing world.
De Bleeker posted the list on Twitter amid a dispute with a right-wing opposition party, which claimed the government had not set aside enough funds to buy enough vaccines, The Brussels Times reported.
Belgium is buying 33.5 million vaccines at a cost of 279 million euros, according to a screenshot shared by De Bleeker.
“We wanted to provide full transparency, but we were a little too generous,” a spokesman for De Bleeker told The Times. “Technically, these prices shouldn’t have been released, so we removed the tweet.”
On Friday, a European Commission spokesman said: “We can’t say anything about this case, everything about vaccines and prices is covered by confidentiality clauses, in the interest of society and also in the interest of the ongoing negotiations,” according to the Guardian .
Vaccine prices to the EU, revealed by De Bleeker, will differ from the costs paid by the US and Canada.
In some cases, the European price may reflect how much companies have received from EU authorities.
For example, the EU appears to pay 24% less for Pfizer vaccines than the US, the Guardian reported, citing analysis by Bernstein Research. The EU contributed significant funding to BioNTech, which developed the vaccine for Pfizer.
Similarly, the US is paying a $ 4 dose for the vaccine produced by AstraZeneca and developed in Oxford, UK, while the EU will pay $ 2.18 (1.78 euros), Bernstein said.
The Moderna vaccine, developed in Massachusetts, has received $ 2.5 billion in funding from the White House and will cost 20 percent more in Europe, the Guardian said.
It costs $ 15 in the US, but $ 18 in Europe.
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