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Who should profit from the vaccines?

2021-06-01

Oxfam is a British major relief organisation that normally promotes and finances vaccines for Third World countries. They think too much money goes to profits and too little to vaccination of poor people.  www.oxfam.org

“These billionaires are the human face of the huge profits many pharmaceutical corporations are making from the monopoly they hold on these vaccines. These vaccines were funded by public money and should be first and foremost a global public good, not a private profit opportunity.” Anna Marriott, health policy manager at  Oxfam.

Figures of this kind are never completely accurate but this summary of research done by Oxfam are probably close to reality. 


1. New vaccine billionaires, in order of net worth:

$ billions

  1. Stéphane Bancel – Moderna’s CEO 4.3
  2. Ugur Sahin, CEO and co-founder of BioNTech 4
  3. Timothy Springer – an immunologist and founding investor of Moderna 2.2
  4. Noubar Afeyan – Moderna’s Chairman 1.9
  5. Juan Lopez-Belmonte– Chairman of ROVI, a company with a deal to manufacture and package the Moderna vaccine 1.8
  6. Robert Langer – a scientist and founding investor in Moderna 1.6
  7. Zhu Tao co-founder and chief scientific officer at CanSino Biologics 1.3
  8. Qiu Dongxu, co-founder and senior vice president at CanSino Biologics 1.2
  9. Mao Huihua, also co-founder and senior vice president at CanSino Biologics 1





2. The following vaccine billionaires saw their net worth increase from 2020 to 2021 expressed in billions of US dollars:

increase from 2020 to 2021

  1. Jiang Rensheng & family, Chair, Zhifei Biological products 7.60 to 24.40
  2. Cyrus Poonawalla, Founder, Serum Institute of India 8.20 to 12.70
  3. Tse Ping, Sinopharm 7.30 to 8.90
  4. Wu Guanjiang, Co-founder, Zhifei Biological products 1.80 to 5.10
  5. Thomas Struengmann & family, Portfolio includes Germany’s BioNTech and Uruguay’s Mega Pharma 9.60 to 11.00
  6. Andreas Struengmann & family, Portfolio includes Germany’s BioNTech and Uruguay’s Mega Pharma 9.60 to 11.00
  7. Pankaj Patel, controls listed company Cadila Healthcare 2.90 to 5.00
  8. Patrick Soon-Shiong, ImmunityBio 6.40 to 7.50

https://www.oxfam.org.nz/news-media/media-releases/covid-vaccines-create-9-new-billionaires/





3. In addition, many individual share-holders profit from the boom

For instance “today, the company (Pfizer) announced that  its coronavirus vaccine brought in .5 billion in revenue during the first three months of this year , nearly a quarter of the company’s total revenue. The company expects to make about 0 million in pretax vaccine profits in the first quarter.  (NYT 2021-05-05)