Vaccine-makers kept $1.4 billion in prepayments for canceled COVID shots for the world's poor.
A participant in the Novavax vaccine trial at Howard University in Washington receives a dose on Jan. 22, 2021.
Those negotiations went badly at the outset. The companies initially shut the organization out of the market, prioritizing high-income countries that were able to pay more to lock up the first doses. Gavi eventually reached deals with nine manufacturers. Gavi has reached settlements with Moderna, the Serum Institute of India and several Chinese manufacturers to cancel unneeded doses, surrendering $700 million in prepayments, the documents show.
The terms of Gavi’s deals were kept secret because they were with private companies. There has been no public accounting of how much drug companies have earned from canceled vaccines. Gavi also made concessions to exit its deal with the Serum Institute of India. Gavi canceled 145 million doses by allowing the company to keep money Gavi had paid in advance, to cover the cost of materials that had already been procured. Serum also gave Gavi a credit note of an undisclosed amount that the organization can use to procure the many routine immunizations it buys from Serum each year.
Gavi has proposed that the dispute go to mediation, but the company has “until now refused to engage in meaningful negotiations,” the documents say. Some of the disputed vaccines have expiration dates as early as mid-2023. The dispute is unresolved. In a statement, the company said it is hoping to negotiate a new deal to supply its vaccine to Gavi.
Dr. Seth Berkley, Gavi’s chief executive, declined to comment for this article. But in an interview in December about the future of the global COVID vaccination program, he said Gavi was paying less per dose than what it had initially planned for vaccine purchases and substantially less than high-income countries paid for their shots.
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