Pfizer’s BioNTech-partnered COVID-19 vaccine Comirnaty and its antiviral pill Paxlovid are destined to reap many billions in 2022, but the company’s first-quarter pandemic haul may come in lighter than previously thought, one group of analysts predicts.
Louise Chen’s team at Cantor Fitzgerald has dialed back its first-quarter sales estimate for Pfizer while keeping its full-year predictions for the company “intact,” the analysts said in a note to clients Monday. The team's updated forecast assumes Comirnaty and Paxlovid revenues for the first three months of the year will come in lower-than-expected.
“Based on publicly available information from government websites on orders delivered, we believe that consensus estimates … are too high,” Chen’s team wrote.
Consensus estimates currently foresee $1.9 billion in first-quarter Paxlovid sales in the U.S., while Comirnaty is expected to generate $2 billion over that same period.
For Pfizer to hit its Paxlovid sales target stateside, the company would need to deliver 3.66 million treatment courses, Chen wrote. But, according to the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS’) website, a total of 1.4 million courses of the oral antiviral have been distributed, the Cantor Fitzgerald team pointed out. Doing some arithmetic with the 143,000 courses deployed in 2021, the analysts figure 1.2 million Paxlovid doses were distributed in the first three months of 2022. That translates to about $630 million in first-quarter sales.
It's a similar story outside the U.S., where consensus estimates peg first-quarter Paxlovid sales at $1.4 billion. Pfizer would have needed to distribute around 4 million courses in 2022’s first quarter to hit its sales target, “but we believe that ramp-up is too steep given the amount distributed in [2021’s fourth quarter],” the analysts said.
They added that they expect Paxlovid’s ex-U.S. sales for the first three months of the year to clock in at around $350 million.
As for Pfizer’s mRNA-based vaccine, consensus estimates see first-quarter U.S. sales of Comirnaty around $2 billion, which the Cantor team believes is “too high based on what we are seeing on the CDC website.”
In the last quarter of 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's website showed an increase in distribution of 103 million doses, which coincided with Pfizer’s own reports of $2.2 billion in U.S. sales. In 2022’s first quarter, meanwhile, the website showed an increase in distribution of 47 million doses. This implies a “step down in Comirnaty U.S. sales for 1Q22 versus 4Q21,” the analysts explained.
Pfizer, for its part, expects big returns on its vaccine and antiviral in the pandemic’s third year. For 2022, the company expects to generate total Comirnaty and Paxlovid sales of $54 billion, with its shot comprising $32 billion of that expected haul. In 2021, the company reaped full-year sales of $81.3 billion, buoyed by nearly $37 billion in COVID-19 shot revenues.