A recent analysis estimated that 342,000 unvaccinated people were hospitalized with COVID-19 in the USA over a 3-month period this summer, and each hospitalization costs about $20,000. Though the analysis “made assumptions that result in a conservative estimate of costs attributable to preventable, unvaccinated hospitalizations”, it concluded that “total preventable costs for those three months now stand at an estimated $5.7 billion”. While this analysis did not specify how much money was spent on pharmaceutical agents, clearly these costs make up a substantial part of any hospital bill. As any doctor knows, patients hospitalized with COVID-19 are treated with a cocktail of pain medications, steroids, antibiotics, sedatives, and anti-viral agents. While some of these medications are cheap, others can be quite expensive. Remdesivir, for example, costs over $3,100 per treatment course. Given how hospitals seek to maximize profit, even a single Tylenol pill can cost $15.
In contrast, the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine costs $19.50 per dose, while the Moderna vaccine costs $15 per dose. Medicare also pays about $40 for administering the vaccine. As such, vaccinating these 342,000 individuals with two mRNA doses would have cost around $41 million, though only about $13.5 million of this would have gone to pharmaceutical companies. Even if every unvaccinated patient hospitalized with COVID-19 was treated with just nine $15 Tylenol pills, the vaccines would save money. Overall, the cost of a COVID-19 hospitalization is 150 times more expensive than vaccination.
Notably, the vaccines are very effective at keeping people alive and out of the hospital, and we should all be grateful to everyone involved in their development. According to CDC data and data from individual states, over 90% of people who are hospitalized with COVID-19 are unvaccinated. Basically, if all of the 342,000 hospitalized patients had been vaccinated, one would expect that 287,000 of them would have avoided this fate. About 45 million people could have been fully vaccinated with the $5.7 billion used to treat the 287,000 unvaccinated, hospitalized Americans this summer. The vaccine works for adolescents as well. A recent CDC study found that of 179 hospitalized patients age 12-18 years, 97% were unvaccinated. The study further found that “All 77 case-patients admitted to the intensive care unit, all 29 critically ill case-patients, and both deaths occurred among unvaccinated case-patients”. Vaccines could have prevented all of this.
Additionally, COVID-19 patients can incur significant healthcare costs even if they are not hospitalized. Many outpatients are eligible to receive expensive monoclonal antibodies. Regeneron charges $1,250 per infusion, while other monoclonal antibodies costs about $2,100 per infusion. These costs do not include fees charged by treatment centers. Overall, an analysis of COVID-19 outpatients from a private insurance company found treatment costs were $500-$1,000 per patient. This adds up to a lot of money considering millions of Americans were infected this summer.
Moreover, unethical doctors have raked in money selling fraudulent COVID-19 “treatments” such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine to unvaccinated patients with COVID-19. The anti-vaccine group America’s Frontline Doctors wrote $8.5 million worth of these prescriptions, enriching themselves of course, but also enriching pharmaceutical companies. Ironically, the toxic side effects of these medications have themselves led to a number of hospitalizations, further enriching hospitals and the pharmaceutical industry.
It’s common knowledge that anti-vaxxers are dedicated to filling the coffers of Big Coffin. Simple math leads to another obvious conclusion: they also work extremely hard to enrich hospitals and Big Pharma. Make sure they know that.