Ranking Member Cassidy Delivers Remarks During Moderna Hearing
WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy, M.D. (R-LA), ranking member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, delivered remarks during today’s hearing on the price of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine. Specifically, he talked about Operation Warp Speed during the COVID-19 pandemic and how private companies stepped up to develop and distribute a life-saving vaccine in under a year. He also discussed the importance of balancing price and innovation of medical treatments, citing his own experience as a physician in Louisiana’s charity hospital system.
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Thank you, Chair Sanders.
We share many concerns. We should work together on how to address that too many Americans pay too much for the prescription drugs and medicines upon which they depend.
Today, we’re asking questions of Mr. Bancel. What price does Moderna plan to charge when the vaccine transitions to the commercial market, and how did the company arrive at this price? Why is it different from the price that the government was charged?
Moderna announced recently it will provide the vaccine at no cost to patients. How will the company implement this?
These are fair questions, and hopefully at the end we better understand the issue.
But I’m afraid that the title of today’s hearing -- “Taxpayers Paid Billions for It: So Why Would Moderna Consider Quadrupling the Price of the COVID Vaccine” -- sounds more like a show trial and a public shaming than a fact-finding mission.
The Chair’s public statement speaks of ‘corporate greed’ in the context of over one million Americans who tragically died during the pandemic. I don’t see the link. I do see a link between millions of lives saved because of the quick development of a vaccine, made here in the United States of America.
COVID-19 cost the U.S. economy an estimated $26 billion a day during 2020 and 2021. In this light, a study by the International Monetary Fund showed that Operation Warp Speed and the taxpayer dollars spent to support the vaccines would have paid for itself if it had cut the duration of the pandemic by just 12 hours.
The initial estimates for the development of a vaccine were 3 to 10 years. Thanks to Operation Warp Speed and private industry—American Capitalism—the world leading COVID vaccines were developed and distributed in less than one year. The taxpayers’ return on their investment is incalculable.
Some love to criticize and decry capitalism. But it is the reason we developed multiple world-leading vaccines in less than a year. It is the reason hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Americans are alive today. This would not be if it were not for the vaccines.
But cost is an issue. During my decades treating patients in Louisiana’s charity hospital system, I had patients who could not afford the drugs I prescribed. My nurse and I would sit on the phone with insurance companies and plead to get the drugs they needed.
I’ve also seen what happens when a drug is not available. When there were no other options. When there was a death sentence or a life of chronic illness, because a medicine to treat the chronic illness or the condition did not exist.
Then, years later, I’d have a different patient sitting in front of me with the same diagnosis and then I could tell them that there was hope.
Why? Because there had been, in the interim, treatments developed for their condition.
It is easy to put COVID vaccine development as one of these success stories, but it happened over 10 months. At first, we had no way to prevent, and 10 months later there was. It seems to me that as if we, as a committee, have lost sight of the bigger picture.
For decades, this committee has been passing legislation knowing that at one point we would have to ask companies to step up and do exactly what Moderna did during this pandemic.
We authorized grant funding, we set the groundwork for public-private partnerships, and stood up new institutions, all with the purpose of having a vaccine quickly developed in case the worst happened.
When it did in 2020, Moderna responded, applied for the grants, and worked on a technology that had a high likelihood of otherwise never making it out of the lab.
Others did not make the same choice as Moderna. I will say, it sends a hostile signal to future and prospective partners that Moderna is now being singled out for its decision to work more closely with the government.
There are legitimate policy questions to ask about how Moderna will price their vaccine post-commercialization. We are all interested in that. We’ve never been in this situation before, where a company is now taking the reins back after the federal government controlled all distribution of their product.
But, this is not the time to discuss eliminating intellectual property rights or destroying the business models of those whom our country will need to respond to the next pandemic or develop the next life-changing cure.
We cannot live in a fantasy world and pretend that what we do in this committee will not affect those future decisions.
I want people to know that this committee is doing whatever it can to encourage people to find cures for cancer, to Alzheimer’s, to ALS, or other devastating diseases. And that if they do and if a private company does, they shall be rewarded. Lives depend upon this.
Senator Sanders, I want to work with you. But not if the purpose of the hearing is to simply demonize capitalism. We should not hate the thought of a person or company making a profit, that we lose sight of the ideas and accomplishments their profit is rewarding.
We cannot be a country that encourages citizens to succeed and make a difference, and then shames them when they do.
If we want to consider real policies that work to lower the cost Americans pay for their medicines, then let’s work together.
Thank you and I look forward to hearing from our witnesses.
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