As John Key took to the airwaves to take on the Government over its Covid-19 response, he said we could have paid for priority delivery of the Pfizer vaccine – a claim the company says is ‘incorrect and baseless’
Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer has categorically denied former prime minister John Key’s claim that New Zealand could have paid $40 million for earlier access to its Covid-19 vaccine, saying the notion is “incorrect and baseless”.
Key made the allegation as part of a media blitzkrieg criticising the Government’s Covid response and accusing ministers and officials of living in “a smug hermit kingdom”.
While the vaccine access claim was not included in the opinion piece published by Stuff, the NZ Herald and a range of other outlets, Key told RNZ’s Morning Report the Government had failed to stump up the sum needed to secure priority access to the vaccine.
“The Government wouldn’t pay $40 million to Pfizer to get us the vaccines that we deserved. Instead, they’d rather pay a billion or a billion-and-a-half a week to be in level 4 lockdown.”
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins have previously denied such an option was open to Cabinet, with Hipkins telling Parliament that Pfizer was “not willing to offer rich countries the opportunity to pay more in order to displace countries who cannot afford to do that”.
The company itself has now weighed in, with a New Zealand spokesman telling Newsroom on Monday that “the notion of any national government paying a premium for priority dose delivery is incorrect and baseless”.
The spokesman said the Government had signed an initial agreement with Pfizer to supply 1.5 million doses in December last year, followed by an additional deal for 8.5 million doses in March this year.
While its negotiations were confidential, the supply of vaccine to New Zealand was developed based on the availability of doses and the “earliest schedule that could be provided at that time”.
Pfizer was committed to equitable vaccine access, and continued to meet its contractual obligations to the Government “in every respect”, the spokesman said.
‘Cost-benefit arithmetic’
The $40m figure used by Key appears to stem from a blog post by University of Auckland economist Robert MacCulloch, who alleged in July the Government was “obscuring what went wrong with their Pfizer vaccine orders”.
Citing a BMJ article which said Israel had paid US$23.50 per Pfizer dose, the US $19.50 and the UK $14.70, MacCulloch then assumed New Zealand had offered a figure similar to that of the US which he used to calculate the cost of securing “a hugely increased schedule of deliveries”.
“The cost-benefit arithmetic goes like this: for our population of just 5 million, paying $40 million more (for two doses) could have avoided billions upon billions of additional economic and well-being costs.”
Speaking to Newsroom, MacCulloch said he stood by his claims despite rebuttals from Pfizer and the Government, and argued the matter could be cleared up with greater transparency.
“No-one will release it, the New Zealand Government won’t release details of the negotiations, so how do any of us know?…If they’re not afraid of it, why not release any of this information into the public domain?”
He said the Government had made a mistake by not ordering the Pfizer vaccine at large scale earlier last year to secure a supply. However, Pfizer’s Australia and New Zealand managing director Anne Harris has previously told TVNZ the Government was not slow to order its vaccine.
While Israeli officials have anonymously told some media the country did pay a premium for the Pfizer vaccine, it also agreed to share private patient data with the drug company to help provide proof of concept for the vaccine’s efficacy – a decision not without some controversy.
Asked whether the speed at which New Zealand had ordered the Covid vaccines was separate to the issue of how much it had paid, MacCulloch said it was “all related to the cost”.
The Government had wanted to wait to see which vaccine was best before purchasing it at scale, which he said was “wanting to have your cake and eat it too”.
MacCulloch said the Government should have been willing to bear the cost of purchasing not just Pfizer but all its rivals at scale in order to have swift access even if some were later proven to be ineffective. He disputed this was a different argument to the one in his blog post, which focused on the per-dose cost paid for the Pfizer vaccine by different countries.
The economist said his criticism of the Government’s approach was not partisan in nature, noting he had criticised Key for failing to carry out similar cost-benefit analyses while leading the country.
While Israeli officials have anonymously told some media the country did pay a premium for the Pfizer vaccine, it also agreed to share private patient data with the drug company to help provide proof of concept for the vaccine’s efficacy – a decision not without some controversy.
Some have also cited Canada’s renegotiation of a Pfizer contract to obtain vaccines earlier than planned – but Canadian media reported that was due to the country’s vaccine authorisation process moving more swiftly than had been expected.
Key did not respond to a request for comment.
