Pfizer turns to China as COVID vaccine demand fades

Pfizer is seeking to team up with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in search of a new cash cow as demand for COVID-19 vaccines declines.

The drugmaker is cutting $3.5 billion worth of jobs and expenses after facing lower-than-expected sales of its COVID-19 vaccine and Paxlovid. Revenue forecasts have been slashed by 13% to $58 billion for 2023 due entirely to fallen demand for its COVID products, reports Reuters. While efforts have been made to revive vaccine mandates, the shots’ deadly legacy has prompted several governments to ban forced vaccinations.

Now Pfizer is hoping for a new boon as it teams up with Chinese biotechnology firms to develop and market products within China. The company has partnered with CCP-owned pharmaceutical giant Sinopharm to manufacture Paxlovid domestically and plans to work with other Chinese firms to search for new products.

New ventures will be subject to the CCP's approval, however. Last year, the Chinese government approved Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, manufactured by German firm BioNTech, to be marketed only to foreigners living in mainland China.

But Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla appears unconcerned with the Chinese government’s heavy involvement in the pharmaceutical industry and even recently praised the CCP as being “aligned” with Pfizer.

“The good thing with the Chinese government is that they are very strategic about their priorities,” Bourla told Fortune last week. “The best and safest way to be able to have an impact [is] when the efforts of your company and the efforts of the government are all aligned.”

In addition to partnering with the CCP, Pfizer is also eyeing the cancer industry as a profitable replacement for COVID-19.

“We have a very, very good understanding of why cancer is created, why some medicines work and then [stop] working,” said Bourla, hinting that the company aims to produce vaccines for cancer. “The question that we ask ourselves is, if we were able to do it with COVID, why not with cancer?” he added.

In April Pfizer announced its $43 billion acquisition of Seagen, a pharmaceutical company that provides cancer treatments.

Weeks earlier, Bourla had compared Seagen’s products to the mRNA technology used in Pfizer’s occasionally lethal COVID-19 serum.

“One in three people in the world are going to have cancer in their lifetime,” Bourla warned, adding that “this is something like the mRNA for vaccines, [but] this is for cancer.”

Seagen markets antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) treatments, which are reportedly designed to target tumor cells while sparing healthy ones. Bourla described Seagen’s ADC treatments as “turbocharged guided missiles that are attacking the cancer cells and can make a huge difference.”

Seagen will add four approved cancer therapies to Pfizer’s existing portfolio of 12 treatments. Seagen’s products raked in $2.2 billion for 2022, which include its top-selling drug Adcetris, a treatment for lymph system cancers that brought in $839 million last year.