Hungary agreed to pay about $ 36 a dose for the Covid-19 vaccine produced by Sinopharm, a Chinese state-owned company, according to contracts released by a senior Hungarian official on Thursday. This seems to make Sinopharm’s photo one of the most expensive in the world.
Hungary agreed to buy five million doses of the Sinopharm vaccine, priced at 30 euros ($ 36) each, according to contracts that Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s chief of staff, Gergely Gulyas, uploaded to his Facebook page . The contract is between the Hungarian government and a third-party supplier, and that price far exceeds what the European Union has agreed to pay for vaccines from Western manufacturers.
The European Union said it would pay €15.50 per dose for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, according to Reuters, which cited an internal EU document. For AstraZeneca, it agreed to pay $ 2.15 per dose, according to the Belgian budget secretary.
The contracts that Gulyas published also show that Hungary, which recorded almost half a million cases of coronavirus and more than 16,000 deaths, agreed to pay $ 9.95 per dose for the Russian Sputnik-V vaccine.
The company from which Hungary is buying the vaccine underwent a change of ownership two months before the transaction, won the contract after the government exempted it from participating in an open bidding process, said Miklos Ligeti, legal director of Transparency International Hungary , an anti-corruption group. (Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this article incorrectly reported which company had changed ownership.)
Such arrangements raise red flags for anti-corruption watchdogs, who warn that the involvement of third parties increases the risk of price increases. “We don’t know how much this company actually paid for this vaccine,” said Ligeti.
With publicly available data on this company, Ligeti pointed out figures that he described as worrying. “The Hungarian government signed a contract with a net value of 150 million euros” – $ 179 million – “to a company with a share capital of € 9,000” ($ 10,700), he said.
Hungary is one of the few European countries to sign an agreement with Sinopharm, which has promoted itself to developing countries at a time when many wealthier nations are accumulating doses of Western pharmacists like Pfizer and Moderna. A major selling point has been Sinopharm’s manufacturing capacity: it said it can make up to three billion doses by the end of this year.
Sinopharm’s price is extraordinary in part because the company, unlike Western vaccine manufacturers, has not published detailed data from Phase 3 tests.
Sinopharm is mass producing two vaccines. He says that the first, done in conjunction with the Beijing Institute of Biological Products, has a 79 percent effectiveness rate, and that the second, done with the Wuhan Institute of Biological Products, is 72.5 percent effective.
Adam Liptak contributed reporting.