Get ready to see a lot of pharma officials walking on eggshells

At 10 a.m. today, officials from five of the top drug makers vying to make the first Covid-19 vaccine will face a grilling from the House Energy & Commerce Committee. In a new story for STAT, Damian Garde and Helen Branswell lay out the six burning questions they’ll be listening for when the drug makers take the hot seat.

Those questions, like how quickly each company will be able to actually produce a vaccine, and how they’ll price their vaccines, already loom large in the companies’ opening statements, which were posted online late Monday.

How the companies are planning to dance around the hot-button issue of pricing is particularly striking.

AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson, both of which garnered positive press for promising not to profit off their eventual vaccines, are planning to tout those vows to lawmakers. Merck, which hasn’t taken a pricing pledge, is planning to tell lawmakers its “goal is to ensure that we can make these vaccines available to whomever needs them and to prioritize groups based on risk and medical need.”

Perhaps most telling, however, are the statements of Pfizer and Moderna, neither of which has taken a pricing pledge and neither of which makes any mention of price in their opening statements. Pfizer notes that it believes it can take a vaccine to market without any federal government funding — a decision that would protect it from the calls from progressives for the government to set a fair price for any vaccine produced that relied on taxpayer-funded research.

Check out Helen and Damian’s story here.