Tag: BioNTech

Covid Vaccine Makers’ Stocks Crash as Sales Drop off a Cliff

Moderna and BioNTech shares both fell to their lowest price in years on Monday as the companies behind the most widely-used mRNA COVID-19 vaccines grapple with investor disappointment with crashing revenues.

COVID-19 vaccine and syringe sitting over blue financial graph background. Selective focus. Horizontal composition with copy space. COVID-19 Vaccine and Stock market and finance concept.

From The Daily Sceptic

By WILL JONES

Moderna and BioNTech shares both fell to their lowest price in years on Monday as the companies behind the most widely-used mRNA COVID-19 vaccines grapple with investor disappointment with crashing revenues. Forbes has the key points:

  • BioNTech and Moderna’s stocks fell 8% and 6%, respectively, a decline spurred by BioNTech’s earnings report revealing the German firm’s sales fell 95% year-over-year last quarter.
  • Moderna’s fresh decline came after it reported a 93% annual decline in quarterly revenues in its own earnings release Thursday.
  • Moderna’s $101.20 close Monday was its lowest since November 2020, while BioNTech’s $98.50 close was its lowest since March 2021.
  • BioNTech, which developed a Covid vaccine with Pfizer, said Monday it expects to generate $5.5 billion in Covid vaccine sales this year, a 70% decline from 2022, while Moderna’s $6 billion to $8 billion in forecasted Covid jab sales is similarly about two-thirds below its $18 billion of revenue in the unit last year.
  • The stock crashes moved against broader market gains, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average’s 408-point, or 1.2%, rally its strongest since June 2nd.

Alex Berenson says it shows Wall Street is “finally in on the joke“.

It couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch of medical billionaires.

Investors are voting on the failure of mRNA technology with their feet, fleeing the stocks of Moderna and BioNTech, the two companies that had the greatest wins on the mRNA Covid jabs.

In 2021 and 2022, Moderna and BioNTech rode Covid to tens of billions of dollars in profits. That gravy train is over.

Today, shares in Moderna and BioNTech fell below $100 a share for the first time since the jabs came to market in 2020, plunging almost 10% after BioNTech reported weak second-quarter sales and said it would reduce its planned research spending.

Both companies are down almost 80% from their 2021 peaks. Pfizer, which markets BioNTech’s mRNA jab and shares profits equally with BioNTech, has also fallen, though not as much, since Pfizer has non-mRNA products.

Behind the plunge: demand for Covid shots has fallen off a cliff worldwide and shows no signs of recovering. Last month, Germany said it expected to throw out 200 million expired shots, more than the total number it has administered.

A few months ago, Pfizer predicted that 100 million Covid jabs would be administered in the United States in 2023. Pfizer’s executives no doubt expected that estimate was conservative, given that publicly traded companies would much rather surprise investors with good news than bad news.

But Pfizer disclosed last week that only about 12 million shots have been given so far – and most came very early in the year. “The 12.4 million doses are behind our earlier projections,” Pfizer Chief Executive Albert Bourla acknowledged on a conference call last week. (Full disclosure: I am suing Bourla as part of Berenson v. Biden.)

Meanwhile, efforts to expand mRNA technology to jabs to prevent the flu and RSV are faltering. Large clinical trials suggest that the mRNA shots for those illnesses cause serious side effects at the same rate as they do for Covid.

Meanwhile, the Telegraph reports that NHS flu jabs and Covid boosters will be axed for adults under 65 this winter as the health service attempts to “go back to normal”.

The Government’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation is expected to set out plans on Tuesday which will mean 12 million people aged 50 to 64 are no longer eligible for free vaccines.

The rollout is also expected to start later than normal for those who are given jabs, with the drive not set to begin until October.

The vaccination drive usually starts in early September in an attempt to ensure sufficient protection against an early flu season.

Health officials said the later start would ensure that the vulnerable are protected in the depths of winter when viruses are most likely to spread.

Is that an admission of very short efficacy, if they have to give it in October to ensure it still works in December? Looks like it.

As Enthusiasm For Covid Vaccines Wanes and Millions of Unwanted Doses Expire, German Press Finally Starts Scrutinising Contracts Between Big Pharma and Government

A great many journalists, bureaucrats, politicians and ordinary people were complicit in the excesses of the past several years, and as the policies of the pandemic continue to sour, they’ll do anything but talk about it. This more than anything is the reason for the deafening silence surrounding all of these matters.

From The Daily Sceptic

By EUGYPPIUS

I know it’s not the repudiation we hoped for, but the widening displeasure over the deeply idiotic and imprudent contracts that the European Union negotiated with Pfizer and BioNTech for COVID-19 vaccine doses says a lot about where the vaccinators find themselves, politically and socially, at this late hour.

That erstwhile pillar of the vaccinator-industrial complex, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, has revealed a markedly reduced enthusiasm for the vaccines and their procurement in the past months. After attacking the lack of transparency surrounding the contract negotiations, they’ve found the energy to deplore all the worthless vaccine that our health ministers have purchased:

In Germany, by the end of March 2023, around 83 million COVID-19 vaccine doses expired and were thrown away by with the federal government alone. Health Minister Karl Lauterbach (SPD) has informed a private session of Bundestag budget committee of these developments …

These figures raise many questions. Did Germany, especially under Lauterbach’s predecessor Jens Spahn (CDU), but also during Lauterbach’s tenure during the fight against the pandemic, order too much vaccine? Could they have avoided these costs, which reach into the billions? Or did the state have no choice, because it was not foreseeable how many people would get vaccinated, and how many injections would be needed for effective protection in the longer run?

What devastating answers all of these questions have.

In any case, the EU and the Federal Republic of Germany have purchased far more vaccine than is needed now. As the Ministry of Health informed the Bundestag, Germany has donated 120 million vaccine doses to other countries. Even after these donated doses left the central warehouse, further doses nevertheless expired …

The Ministry explains that additional doses have expired “at the various stages” of the supply chain. This refers to doses shipped to wholesalers, pharmacies and doctors’ offices. These parties are in turn responsible for “proper disposal”, the ministry explains. They did not provide figures on how many doses had expired and been destroyed by these wholesalers, pharmacies and medical practices. It is possible that these numbers have not been collected.

In other words: The 83 million figure represents a floor; nobody actually knows or is all that eager to tabulate how many doses have been thrown away.

When asked by the SZ, the Ministry of Health did not say how much the expired and destroyed doses at the federal level cost. Publicly available data nevertheless supports the assumption that the costs to the taxpayer… are in the billions.

And that may not be all.

Through the start of 2023, the federal government had ordered a total of 672 million doses for 13.1 billion Euros, generally via the EU. Each jab therefore costs on average just under 20 Euros … According to the Ministry of Health, by the start of May, around 192 million doses had been injected in Germany, and some of the deliveries are still outstanding.

More than a year ago, the Berlin-based newspaper Tagesspiegel asked whether Lauterbach was threatened with “billions in damages”. At that time, it was already becoming apparent that vaccine could remain unused. In mid-2022, 3.9 million vaccine doses had expired. By the beginning of 2023, there were already 36.6 million vaccine doses. And now, only five months later, it is already 83 million. By the end of last year, approximately 54 million doses had expired and in the first quarter of 2023, approximately 29 million doses had been destroyed, the ministry informed the Bundestag.

Possibly even more vaccine will have to be destroyed. As of the beginning of May, the Federal Government still has stores amounting to around 120 million doses. Their future is “fraught with uncertainty” and depends, among other things, on the future course of the pandemic, the Ministry of Health informed the Bundestag. The Federal Government still intends to give “unneeded vaccine” to other countries.

Not a single country anywhere on earth can be found to take this stuff.

To avoid having to destroy more vaccine, the EU has now negotiated a partial cancellation of supply contracts with the pharmaceutical companies BioNTech and Pfizer. A “cancellation fee” is due for this, Lauterbach informed the Bundestag. According to reports, Lauterbach did not give a figure. The cancellation fees for unwanted vaccine is likely to reach costs in Germany alone of hundreds of millions of Euros.

While the details of the deal are officially secret, an outraged Polish health minister revealed several weeks ago that Pfizer and BioNTech have demanded that EU countries pay 50% of the cost for every previously ordered yet unneeded vaccine dose.

At the end of the article there lurks this foul paragraph:

With early access to safe and effective vaccines, many lives have been saved and millions of people have been protected from serious illness. The economic costs of the pandemic have also been reduced and the “impact on social life has been noticeably mitigated”. The vaccine surplus is a consequence of this strategy. This is how the Ministry of Health justified the bulk purchases in the Bundestag.

We’ve been over this many times at the plague chronicle, but as long as politicians and the press continue to indulge in these hollow excuses, I’ll keep repeating myself: It’s strange indeed that enthusiasm for these SaFE aNd EfFeCtIvE vaccines should have plummeted in precise inverse correlation to public experience with them. You’d almost think that the more the vaccinators were allowed to vaccinate, the more everybody decided the vaccines weren’t for them after all. This is hardly the response you’d expect to such miraculous, life-saving, side effect-free products.

A great many journalists, bureaucrats, politicians and ordinary people were complicit in the excesses of the past several years, and as the policies of the pandemic continue to sour, they’ll do anything but talk about it. This more than anything is the reason for the deafening silence surrounding all of these matters. What critique there is will increasingly attach itself to isolated matters, such as school closures, and to specific initiatives in which few participated directly, such as the buying of vaccines. They’ll do everything they can to assign blame in those few areas, where they can’t be blamed themselves.

This article originally appeared on Eugyppius’s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here.