Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla lamented that his company has billions of unused COVID-19 vaccines sitting in warehouses during the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) annual meeting in Davos Wednesday.
Bourla said Pfizer has billions of doses waiting for use in low-income countries that have already been paid for by rich countries during a sit-down with WEF executive chairman Klaus Schwab. Bourla said the vaccine doses aren’t being used because the population in much of the developing world isn’t educated enough to create demand for them, and the countries may not have the infrastructure for widespread deployment of them.
“What we discovered through the pandemic was that supply was not enough to resolve the issues that these countries are having,” Bourla told Schwab. “Right now, for example, there are billions of doses of our vaccine, the vaccine that was used in Europe, in the U.S., it was offered to low-income countries for free.”
“They can’t use them right now, because we discovered that one thing was supply, and the other thing is to have educated population that believes the vaccines is doing well, to have doctors or nurses that will administer, to have infrastructure and logistics that you can store it in every place in the country and not only in the capital of the country.” (RELATED: Not Just China: The US Government, Universities Are Hiding Evidence On The Origin Of COVID-19, Experts Allege)
Pfizer reported nearly $8 billion in profits in the first quarter of 2022, driven largely by COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics.