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covid-19 vaccine
Once Free, Covid-19 Vaccines Now Cost Up to $200 for Uninsured in US
"What's at stake is we are reverting back to a system where a person's financial ability to be able to pay will determine their ability to be healthy."
Sep 03, 2024
The latest coronavirus vaccine costs up to $200 for the roughly 25 million uninsured people in the U.S., due to the defunding of a federal program that previously covered the costs, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.
It's the "latest tear in the safety net" as pandemic-era programs wind down, the newspaper reported. Covid-19 vaccines were free for everyone in the U.S. in 2021 and 2022, per federal policy. However, in January, congressional Republicans negotiated a deal that rescinded $6.1 billion in emergency coronavirus relief funding, which killed the Bridge Access Program, launched in April 2023, that covered the cost for the uninsured.
The latest version of the Covid-19 vaccine was approved on August 22 and costs just over $200 for uninsured patients at CVS pharmacies in Nashville and St. Louis—examples cited by the Post.
Raynard Washington, head of the Mecklenburg County health department in North Carolina and chair of the Big Cities Health Coalition, said that vaccine manufacturers Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech should lower their prices to make the shots more affordable for health agencies.
"What's at stake is we are reverting back to a system where a person's financial ability to be able to pay will determine their ability to be healthy," Washington said.
News of the lack of affordable access to the Covid-19 vaccine for uninsured people led to outrage on social media, with one X user asking "Is this the way to keep the rest of us safe?" and another declaring: "This makes me want to scream."
People covered by Medicare—which insures Americans over the age of 65—and Medicaid can still receive Covid-19 vaccines for free. But roughly 25 million people in the U.S. under the age of 65 are uninsured and left to pay the sky-high rates; people of color are disproportionately represented in the ranks of the uninsured.
Moderna, Pfizer, and BioNTech have profited off of the sale of the vaccines even though U.S. and European taxpayers heavily subsidized their development. The companies told the Post that free vaccines would be available through patient assistance programs, but provided no details.
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said it had identified $62 million to purchase Covid-19 vaccines for distribution to health agencies, but officials say that's a "sliver" of what's needed, the paper reported.
The Biden administration in its budget requests repeatedly tried to establish a Vaccines for Adults program aimed at providing shots, including Covid-19 boosters, to uninsured adults, but the efforts stalled in Congress. The proposal was based on a federal Vaccines for Children program that's been active since the 1990s.
The new Covid-19 vaccine is recommended for everyone 6 months of age or older. It includes a level of protection against the KP.2 variant that accounted for roughly one quarter of U.S. cases this summer.
The public health emergency for Covid-19 ended in May 2023 but the virus has killed tens of thousands of people in the U.S. since then and can cause long-term complications.
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'Truly Shameful': Pentagon Ran Secret Anti-Vax Campaign Against China at Height of Covid Pandemic
"I don't think it's defensible," an infectious disease specialist at Dartmouth said of the clandestine effort.
Jun 14, 2024
A Reuters investigation published Friday revealed that the Pentagon ran a "clandestine operation" aimed at discrediting China's coronavirus vaccines and treatments, a campaign that U.S. public health experts and others condemned as a cynical ploy that endangered lives for political purposes.
According to Reuters, the Pentagon's secretive campaign was designed to counter what the U.S. "perceived as China's growing influence in the Philippines," a country that was ravaged by Covid-19. The virus, which killed millions of people globally, was first detected in Wuhan, China in late 2019.
The campaign reportedly began in the spring of 2020 and was terminated in the middle of 2021 after it had expanded beyond Southeast Asia to Central Asia and the Middle East. U.S. officials involved in the effort worked "to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other lifesaving aid that was being supplied by China" using "phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos," Reuters found.
"Social media posts decried the quality of face masks, test kits, and the first vaccine that would become available in the Philippines—China's Sinovac inoculation," the news agency added. "Reuters identified at least 300 accounts on X, formerly Twitter, that matched descriptions shared by former U.S. military officials familiar with the Philippines operation. Almost all were created in the summer of 2020 and centered on the slogan #Chinaangvirus—Tagalog for China is the virus."
One tweet that Reuters described as "typical" exclaimed that "COVID came from China and the VACCINE also came from China, don't trust China!"
Daniel Lucey, an infectious disease specialist at Dartmouth's Geisel School of Medicine who previously worked as a military physician, told Reuters that he was "extremely dismayed, disappointed and disillusioned to hear that the U.S. government would" conduct such an operation.
"I don't think it's defensible," Lucey added.
"We were literally ready to let people die to avoid giving China a PR win."
Others expressed outrage on social media. Justin Sandefur, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, called the Pentagon's campaign "truly shameful" and lamented that "we were literally ready to let people die to avoid giving China a PR win."
"That 'pork in the vaccine' nonsense you saw on Facebook was U.S. taxpayer-funded," Sandefur wrote.
Reuters reported that a "key part" of the Pentagon's strategy was to "amplify the disputed contention that, because vaccines sometimes contain pork gelatin, China's shots could be considered forbidden under Islamic law."
"Tailoring the propaganda campaign to local audiences across Central Asia and the Middle East, the Pentagon used a combination of fake social media accounts on multiple platforms to spread fear of China's vaccines among Muslims at a time when the virus was killing tens of thousands of people each day," the agency noted.
One senior U.S. military officer whom Reuters described as directly involved with the propaganda campaign in Southeast Asia told the outlet that "we didn't do a good job sharing vaccines with partners," so "what was left to us was to throw shade on China's." The U.S. and other rich countries repeatedly obstructed efforts to lift vaccine patents to more widely distribute coronavirus shots.
Pressed by Reuters, the Pentagon acknowledged that the U.S. military launched a propaganda effort attacking the efficacy of China's vaccine.
World Health Organization (WHO) guidance released in June 2022 stated that China's Sinovac vaccine is "safe and effective for all individuals aged 18 and above."
"A large phase 3 trial in Brazil showed that two doses, administered at an interval of 14 days, had an efficacy of 51% against symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection, 100% against severe COVID-19, and 100% against hospitalization starting 14 days after receiving the second dose," the WHO said.
Reuters reported that some within the U.S. State Department objected to the Pentagon's effort to promote skepticism about China's vaccine, arguing that a "health crisis was the wrong time to instill fear or anger through a psychological operation."
"But in 2019, before Covid surfaced in full force, then-Secretary of Defense Mark Esper signed a secret order that later paved the way for the launch of the U.S. military propaganda campaign," Reuters observed. "The order elevated the Pentagon's competition with China and Russia to the priority of active combat, enabling commanders to sidestep the State Department when conducting psyops against those adversaries."
"The Pentagon spending bill passed by Congress that year also explicitly authorized the military to conduct clandestine influence operations against other countries, even 'outside of areas of active hostilities,'" the agency added.
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'Appalling': EU Nations Destroy €4 Billion Worth of Covid Vaccines After Hoarding Doses
"Handing exclusive rights to publicly-funded vaccines and medicines to just a few companies simply does not work—for rich countries or poorer ones," said an adviser to the People's Vaccine Alliance.
Dec 18, 2023
Vaccine equity campaigners on Monday condemned European Union nations for hoarding Covid-19 vaccine doses at the expense of low-income countries after a new Politico analysis estimated that the bloc's members have thrown out at least €4 billion—roughly $4.4 billion—worth of the lifesaving shots.
That equates to around 215 million coronavirus vaccine doses—very likely an undercount, given that Politico wasn't able to obtain waste numbers from every E.U. member country.
"Calculations based on available data show that E.U. countries have discarded an average of 0.7 jabs for every member of their population," the outlet reported. "Top of the scale is Estonia, which binned more than one dose per inhabitant, followed closely by Germany, which also threw away the largest raw volume of jabs."
Piotr Kolczyński, E.U. health policy adviser at the People's Vaccine Alliance and Oxfam International, said in a statement that the new analysis is "further proof that the E.U. wasted millions of its Covid-19 vaccines, hoarded early in the pandemic, as it locked poorer countries out of access."
"The appalling waste in the world's pandemic response was disastrous," said Kolczyński. "Handing exclusive rights to publicly-funded vaccines and medicines to just a few companies simply does not work—for rich countries or poorer ones."
Politico attributed much of the waste to the E.U.'s massive 2021 deal with Pfizer and BioNTech, which agreed to sell 1.1 billion doses of their mRNA jab to members of the bloc as low-income countries struggled to obtain shots for their populations.
"Despite considering a significant reform to reign in pharmaceutical waste and profiteering within its borders, the EU fails to support similar efforts on the global stage."
E.U. members—Germany in particular—pushed back aggressively against the India and South Africa-led call for a Covid-19 vaccine patent waiver, which proponents said would have lifted key barriers to expanding vaccine manufacturing and access. Germany alone has wasted 83 million vaccine doses, according to Politico.
The pharmaceutical industry, for its part, lobbied aggressively to preserve its monopoly control over vaccine recipes and production, focusing significant attention on the European Commission.
With the global health emergency formally over, countries are currently negotiating the terms of a pandemic agreement that would govern how the international community responds to the next global crisis.
Reuters reported in September that "governments remain divided, failing to agree on some of the basics needed to strengthen health systems worldwide."
"Those basics, all issues that hindered a coordinated global response to the Covid-19 outbreak, include the sharing of information, costs, and vaccines," Reuters added. "The divisions arose anew in June, when the European Union negotiated new agreements with pharmaceutical companies to reserve vaccines for future pandemics. The agreements led critics to accuse the bloc of 'vaccine apartheid.'"
Last month, 18 members of the European Parliament wrote to the Council of the European Union and the European Commission expressing "concerns about the E.U.'s negotiating position."
"It proposes to continue relying solely on voluntary measures in the deployment of key public health interventions, such as the transfer of technology, know-how and 'trade secrets,' or the removal of intellectual property barriers," the lawmakers wrote. "In the meantime, the E.U. avoids specific commitments for equitable access to pandemic products."
As the People's Vaccine Alliance noted Monday, the E.U.'s latest proposed text "suggests removing transparency and equity measures."
"Despite considering a significant reform to reign in pharmaceutical waste and profiteering within its borders, the E.U. fails to support similar efforts on the global stage," said Kolczyński. "It is one rule for the E.U. and another for everyone else."
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