Governments around the world have spent tens of billions on vaccines to combat the covid-19 pandemic, and Pfizer (PFE) has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of that spending.
While the company's stock price is well off the highs it hit last fall, it is still nearly 40% above where it was at the start of the pandemic in March 2020.
But the decline has been attributed to lower demand for the company's pair of breakthrough covid vaccines, Comirnaty and Paxlovid.
Pfizer forecast $54 billion in Comirnaty and Paxlovid sales for 2022 after reporting covid-19 shot revenue of $37 billion in 2021.
Pfizer may be on the way to reaching that goal, but with an eye towards 2023 and beyond, the company is now considering raising the price of its top products.
Pfizer Raising Prices
While the pandemic may or may not be over, the demand for vaccines is waning.
A recent poll by Kaiser Family Foundation found that about two-thirds of American adults do not plan on getting a covid vaccine booster soon.
As a result, Pfizer expects to raise the price of its vaccines to between $110 and $130 per dose, Reuters reported. The U.S. government currently pays the company, and its German partner BioNTech, about $30 per dose.
The move comes as the company expects the market for vaccines to move to the private insurance market once the U.S. stops subsidizing the public market.
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla called 2023 a "pivotal year" at the Yahoo Finance All Markets Summit this week while saying it plans to bring more than 10 new medicines to market next year.
In a recent analyst note, Carter Gould of Barclays said he expects sales of Comirnaty and Paxlovid could fall by 43% and 51%, respectively, next year, according to Reuters.
But that's not the only headwind the company faces in the coming years.
Following 2023, Pfizer expects to lose patent protection on between $17 billion and $20 billion of its existing product sales between 2026 and 2029.
Pfizer has shipped more than 3.6 billion doses of its vaccine to 180 countries around the world as of the end of the previous quarter (Pfizer releases its current quarter results in November).
The U.S. is one of the company's biggest clients, with the U.S. Department of Defense purchasing 105 million doses from Pfizer. The government also spent $1.74 billion to get 65 million doses of rival Moderna's (MRNA) covid vaccine.
Is the Pandemic Over?
President Joe Biden got into some hot water a few weeks ago when he said that the pandemic was over on 60 Minutes.
There was immediate pushback and the White House walked back his comments.
The White House is currently seeking $22.4 billion for covid-19 funding as part of a larger $47 billion bill that would cover funding for the war in Ukraine and other issues.
Fewer than 15 million Americans have received a booster shot over the first six weeks since the rollout of the new shots. During the rollout of the booster shot campaign in 2021, 22 million people got doses over the first six weeks.
But the World Health Organization says that the pandemic isn't over, saying that it's concerned that "despite being well into the third year of the pandemic, there remained considerable uncertainties as to the further trajectory of the virus."
