Hungary has agreed to pay about $ 36 per dose for the Covid-19 vaccine made by Sinopharm, a Chinese state-owned company, according to contracts announced Thursday by a senior Hungarian official. It turns out that the Sinopharm survey is one of the most expensive in the world.
Hungary has agreed to buy five million doses of the Sinopharm vaccine, each costing 30 euros ($ 36), according to contracts uploaded by Prime Minister Viktor Orban, chief of staff Gergely Gulyas, on his Facebook page. The contract is between the Hungarian government and a third-party seller, and the price is much higher than what the European Union has agreed to pay for vaccines from Western manufacturers.
The European Union has said it will pay €According to Reuters, which quoted an internal EU document, according to Reuters 15.50 per dose for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. According to the Belgian budget secretary, AstraZeneca has agreed to pay $ 2.15 per dose.
The contracts that Mr. Gulyas published also shows that Hungary, which has recorded nearly half a million cases of coronavirus and more than 16,000 deaths, has agreed to pay $ 9.95 per dose for the Russian Sputnik V vaccine.
The company from which Hungary buys the vaccine underwent a change of ownership two months before the deal, got the contract after the government released it to take part in a public procurement process, said Miklos Ligeti, legal director of Transparency International, said. Hungary, an anti-corruption group. (Due to a modification error, a previous version of this article incorrectly explained which company changed ownership.)
Such arrangements raise red flags for anti-corruption watchdogs, warning that third-party involvement increases the risk of price push. “We do not know how much this company actually paid for this vaccine,” he said. Ligeti said.
Given the publicly available data about this company, Mr. Ligeti pointed to figures he described as worrying. “The Hungarian government has awarded a contract with a net worth of 150 million euros” – $ 179 million – “to a company with a registered capital of € 9,000” ($ 10,700), he said.
Hungary is one of the few European countries to have signed an agreement with Sinopharm, which has promoted itself to developing countries at a time when many richer countries are accumulating doses by Western drugmakers such as Pfizer and Moderna. Sinopharm’s manufacturing capability was a major selling point: he said it could make up to three billion doses by this year.
The Sinopharm Prize is partly extraordinary because the company, unlike the Western vaccine manufacturers, did not publish detailed data from Phase 3 trials.
Sinopharm manufactures two vaccines. It says that the first, together with the Beijing Institute of Biological Products, has an efficiency rate of 79 percent, and that the second, made with the Wuhan Institute of Biological Products, is 72.5% effective.
Adam Liptak reported.