The COVID vaccine was a relief to us all, finally serving as some protection from a global pandemic that had us trapped in our homes and wary of going out for over a year. Hearing that the shot was completely funded by the government and free to anyone living in the United States lifted a huge financial burden off many families. Subsequent booster shots were also covered by the government — until now. The ending of coverage for this most recent round of booster shots could spell bad news for Americans still living alongside the virus.
Over the last three years, the federal government has spent over $30 billion on the development and distribution of COVID vaccines at no cost to the U.S. population. However, the Biden Administration is running out of funding, meaning that this season’s round of booster shots are being put on the commercial market for manufacturers to sell to insurers and purchasers at whatever price they see fit. With this comes a price increase to an expected $110-$130.
The good news is that insurance will still cover this cost for most Americans. Anyone subscribed to private health insurance, Medicare or Medicaid will receive the new booster at no cost. The CDC has also launched the Vaccines For Children program, covering children under the age of 19, and the Bridge Access Program, providing anyone else who is uninsured with a free vaccine until Dec. 31, 2024.
After 2024, however, this will become a big problem. While the proportion of the population that is uninsured has been dropping in recent years, an estimated 7% of Americans — 25.3 million people — still do not have health insurance in 2023. This means that millions of Americans will lose access to continued COVID protection by 2025. Not only is this dangerous to the health of uninsured Americans, but since insurance companies are not subject to the Affordable Care Act’s requirement to provide vaccines without any out-of-pocket cost, all Americans may be subject to paying hundreds of dollars for vaccination whenever insurance companies decide they no longer want to cover the charge.
It’s easy to argue that prices need to increase with vaccine manufacturers now taking on the cost of production: after all, creating life-saving medicine cannot possibly be cheap. However, factoring in the required labor and the components of the medication, it only costs $2-$3 to produce a single dose. This low production price makes the $100 selling price totally unnecessary.
To make matters worse, politicians and pharmaceutical companies love throwing money back and forth for their own personal gain. Pfizer gave $1 million to members of Congress and wrote checks to 1,048 individual candidates in state legislative races during the 2020 election cycle. This is no doubt a large reason why Pfizer administered the most COVID vaccines of any manufacturer in the United States.
Pfizer is certainly not the only pharmaceutical company gaining far more than it should. One study comparing the revenue of pharmaceutical companies to S&P 500 companies (500 of the top companies on the stock market) found that pharma companies reported a gross profit margin of 76.5% while S&P 500 companies reported a 37.4% gross profit margin.
This ridiculously large gap is thanks to the wildly unregulated nature of selling drugs. A cold medicine can be almost totally ineffective, have side effects like seizures, hallucinations and death, and still cost $20 in every major drugstore (that was NyQuil by the way). There’s no regulation for pricing and it’s almost impossible to sue these companies, as they are financially and politically invincible.
COVID has become endemic, meaning that we’ll be living with it for the foreseeable future. As the virus mutates, new boosters will come out regularly and be added to our annual list of vaccinations. With these life-saving shots no longer being covered by the government, hundreds of thousands of people could die each year of a preventable disease as higher prices mean fewer people will have access to life-saving vaccination. Unfortunately, the COVID vaccine is likely going to fall into the same rhythm as insulin, with prices rising steadily until millions have lost their lives to the clutches of greed. So, be sure to get vaccinated as soon as the shots are available, because you never know how much they’ll cost if you wait.
