Pfizer Stock Posts Big Drop as Demand for COVID Shots and Paxlovid Dries Up
- by Rishma Parpia
- Published December 18, 2023
- Pharma
The value of shares in Pfizer, Inc. stock has dropped by over eight percent in recent weeks, bringing it to the lowest it has been in more than 10 years. The drop follows a recent announcement by the pharmaceutical company that it will post a decrease in revenue this year that will come in well under Wall Street’s expectations.1
Pfizer forecasts it will generate sales revenue of $58.5 billion to $61.5 billion in 2024, while Wall Street had anticipated $63.17 billion for the company.2
Pfizer’s 2024 revenue forecast includes $5 billion from its Comirnaty mRNA (messenger ribonucleic acid) COVID-19 shots and $3 billion in sales from its COVID-19 antiviral drug Paxlovid, adding up to a total of $8 billion from its COVID products. This represents a 90 percent decline from the $57 billion Pfizer earned from its COVID products in 2022 and significantly less than the $13.8 billion financial analysts had expected for 2023.3 4
Pfizer CFO Dave Denton told investors:
While we do not expect COVID vaccination and infection rates to change materially in 2024 versus this year, we have set our Comirnaty and Paxlovid 2024 revenue expectations lower.5
Half of Americans Don’t Want Latest COVID Shots
Pfizer’s revenue forecast for this year is reinforced by a Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) survey in November 2023 that showed that public interest in COVID gene therapies is diminishing. The survey found that roughly 50 percent of adults in the United States indicated they do not plan to receive the latest Comirnaty and Spikevax COVID shots manufactured by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna respectively.
Even people who received the initial COVID shots the first year of pandemic are refusing to get the updated boosters, with only 17.2 percent of Americans over the age of 18 having received the boosters.6
Pfizer has had to readjust its revenue forecast for 2023 because it did not expect public demand for Comirnaty and Paxlovid to decline so dramatically. “We want to be conservative and are giving a good floor. We want to be reliable so that we will not create again uncertainty, which was the case early this year when our estimates were way higher than in reality,” said Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla.7
Pfizer Acquires Cancer Care Biotech Firm
In an effort to improve its financial performance, Pfizer completed acquisition of global biotechnology company Seagen, Inc. on December 14, 2023. The $43 billion deal for Seagen, which specializes in “transformative cancer medicines,” is consistent with Pfizer’s plans to establish a new oncology division.8 Seagen will account for about five percent of Pfizer’s 2024 total sales revenue.9
Other manufacturers of the COVID shot have also taken financial hits over the last two years as public demand and government subsidies for the products have decreased. The value of Moderna stock recently declined by approximately 85 percent from their 2021 peak and Johnson & Johnson’s shares declined by 15 percent from their 2022 peak.10
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