As nations brace for new surges of coronavirus cases as the omicron variant spreads, vaccine manufacturers are seeing their profits soar. A new report by Global Justice Now found that the eight top Pfizer and Moderna shareholders saw their stock holdings jump $10 billion last week following the discovery of the new variant. One of the report’s authors tweeted, “When is a new COVID variant good news? When you are a pharma shareholder, obviously.”
This comes as global public health advocates warn the world will keep seeing more coronavirus variants unless wealthy nations and vaccine manufacturers do more to address vaccine inequity. The World Trade Organization was scheduled to hold a ministerial meeting last week to discuss a waiver on intellectual property rights for vaccines but the meeting was postponed due to—the omicron variant.
We already knew that the vaccines that have been produced, often with public knowledge, have made an absolute fortune for some of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world. Just the two really big ones, Pfizer and Moderna, those vaccines are bringing their manufacturers in $1,000 a second. These were already the most lucrative medicines in history. We thought, “Well, let’s look at what happened when we were all worried last weekend about the omicron variant starting to spread. Let’s look what happened to the stock of those companies.”
What we found, as you said, is that it absolutely soared. That a few shareholders—and when I say shareholders, I mean super wealthy, super big investment corporations—saw their share price rise $10 billion
— source democracynow.org | Dec 07, 2021