Pfizer slashes drug prices for poorest nations, expanding access

Bloomberg: Pfizer Inc plans to sell its entire portfolio of brand-name drugs at cost in as many as 45 lower-income countries, one of the most comprehensive and ambitious drug-access programs ever announced by a large pharmaceutical manufacturer.

The initiative will start in five African countries with 23 drugs for cancer, rare illnesses, inflammatory conditions and infectious diseases. It will eventually include all of the New York-based company’s future therapies or vaccines. The drugs will be sold at the cost of manufacturing, Pfizer said, typically a fraction of their price in U.S. or European markets. The company also plans to invest in local health systems to improve diagnostic capabilities, get the drugs approved and make sure doctors know how to administer them.

Throughout the pandemic, the company has sold its Covid-19 vaccine in lower-income countries for about $7 a dose, near where it puts the cost, compared with $19.50 in the US. For Covid and other illnesses, peer drugmakers have run similar low-cost programs, particularly for diseases common in the developing world. But for most drug categories, many of the newest, most advanced therapies can take years to reach low-income markets, if they ever do.

“There is very little work that is happening in noninfectious diseases,” Pfizer Chief Executive Officer Albert Bourla said in an interview ahead of the announcement at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “We know very well that cancer exists in Africa and kills a lot of people, that cardiovascular diseases exist in Africa and kills a lot of people. And there is no reason for this to happen, other than that they didn’t have the medicines.”

Pfizer has manufactured billions of Covid vaccine doses and distributed them around the world—while also watching the shot become one of the biggest-selling pharmaceutical products of all time. Its expanded drug access program presents new challenges, and the ultimate success or failure may not be known for years. Along with striking the initial agreements with Rwanda, Ghana, Malawi, Senegal and Uganda, Pfizer will need to help many of the countries make significant advances in their local health systems in order to get drugs to patients.

“The devil is in the details,” said Jay Iyer, CEO of the Access to Medicine Foundation, which advocates for drug availability and ranks companies based on how equitably they make products available, how broadly their research programs target global unmet medical needs and how well they integrate global access into their business plans.

Last year, Pfizer was fourth on the foundation’s index, behind GSK Plc (formerly GlaxoSmithKline), Novartis AG and Johnson & Johnson. Iyer said many large drugmakers have historically focused their emerging-market operations on fast-growing economies, where the unmet need can be large, but so is the future sales opportunity.

Typically, those companies “don’t necessarily prioritize the lowest-income countries, but they do recognize that countries like Brazil, India and China are critical to their business,” Iyer said. “They tend to see it as market access.”

Pfizer should be judged based on the volume of “actual drugs to patients” in the lower-income countries it has promised to help, Iyer said in an interview before the announcement. “Whether it’s ambitious or addressing the real need depends on the patients finally reached.”

Following the announcement, Pfizer will open up the program to any other low-income country, as well as nations that have transitioned from low- to lower-middle income in the last decade, as defined by the World Bank. That includes much of sub-Saharan Africa, and countries in Asia and the Middle East including Bangladesh, Cambodia, Laos, Syria and Yemen. The World Bank defines low-income countries as those where the per capita gross national income is less than about $1,000 a year.