Humanitarian Group Protests Outside Pfizer HQ Over Vaccine Prices

In a staged protest, Doctors Without Borders dumped $17 million in fake currency outside Pfizer’s headquarters to draw attention to the company’s pricing of pneumonia vaccines. The amount is intended to represent Pfizer’s daily sales of its pneumococcal drug Prevnar.

The move is tied to an online petition Doctors Without Borders started circulating Nov. 11, asking for the lowest available price for pneumonia drugs: $5 per child, or $1.66 per injection, because inoculation requires at least three injections. According to the group, Pfizer charges $16.50 per vaccine dose, which works out to nearly $50 per patient. By way of comparison, Doctors Without Borders says that GlaxoSmithKline charges $7 per dose, or $21 for each patient, for its pneumococcal vaccine Synflorix.

Pfizer declined to directly address the protest, saying that that the company works hand-in-hand with other humanitarian groups, such as the United Nations Children’s Fund “to provide access to our vaccines … to the world’s poorest countries at the lowest price available.”