Demand for COVID-19 shots falls amid reluctance to boosters
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The demand for COVID-19 vaccines has dropped by more than half from January to March this year amid reluctance for repeated vaccinations in richer nations and vaccine hesitancy in poorer nations, the data analytics firm Airfinity points out.
 As the Covid wave fueled by the Omicron variant subsided, 104 million vaccines were being rolled out weekly by mid-March, indicating a sharp decline from 212 million in the first week of January, The Financial Times reported Sunday, citing data from Airfinity.
That has prompted the firm to cut its 2022 forecast for worldwide sales of non-Chinese Covid-19 vaccines to 6 billion doses, down from its earlier estimate of 9 billion doses. The revenue forecast has been slashed to $64.1 billion, indicating a decline of more than 20% from the previous projection of $80.9 billion made three months ago. Airfinity projects 2 billion â 4 billion doses of vaccine sales for 2023.
âThe vaccine market has moved from high demand and constrained supply, to lower demand with more choice and reluctance from populations to take repeated shots,â remarked Matt Linley, Airfinityâs director of analytics.
âWith Omicron variants causing less severe disease, people donât have the appetite for more doses. Data from third and fourth dose programs in Israel and Chile shows uptake diminished by 25 percent for the booster and 50 percent for the fourth shot.â
According to Airfinity forecasts, Pfizer (NYSE:PFE)/BioNTech (NASDAQ:BNTX) and Moderna (NASDAQ:MRNA) are expected to dominate the global vaccine market this year with a combined market share of 88%. The mRNA-based vaccine makers are projected to generate $36.4 billion and $18.7 billion in sales, down by 15% and 27% from previous estimates, respectively.
Meanwhile, Oxford/AstraZeneca (AZN) and Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), which used a traditional method to develop their COVID-19 shots, are estimated to generate $3 billion and $2.87 billion in sales, respectively. The sales forecast for the protein-based Novavax (NASDAQ:NVAX) vaccine stands at $2.74 billion, down ~41% from the previous estimate of $4.61 billion.
Last year, Pfizer (PFE)/BioNTech (BNTX), Moderna (MRNA), AstraZeneca (AZN), J&J (JNJ), and Novavax (NVAX) raked in $61 billion in vaccine sales in total.
According to Airfinity, many vaccine makers have slowed down their production as inventory levels have increased to an estimated 2.3bn vaccine doses. The firm thinks that 241 million Covid-19 vaccine doses procured by G7 countries and the EU remained unused and expired by mid-March.
Jefferies analyst Roger Song sees signs of an end to the Covid-19 âmoney trainâ for vaccine makers, which look for diversifications to sustain the growth. Song projects the current vaccine market to change to an annual booster market worth about $5 billion â $10 billion in a few years.
âThis year Covid-19 is still providing a money train or cash cow but the companies have made it clear they are diversifying and developing new product pipelines, including pan-respiratory vaccines, which combine flu, coronavirus and RSV (respiratory syncytial virus)â.
The latest estimates of a potential slowdown in vaccine sales come amid the uptake of Covid-19 pills, which entered the markets in 2021-end. However, last month, Airfinity predicted that many in the world would not be able to access the Pfizer (PFE) Covid-19 pill due to regulatory and production issues.