Depending on what you mean, the answer is somewhere between $100 billion and $500 billion in the currency of the realm (USD; which I will use throughout this article).
The question came up, again, because of discussion about whether there should be a waiver on allowing manufacture of the various vaccines without paying anything. Typically, this is for third-world countries. Those questions are complicated and I’m not going to address them in this essay. Instead, I want to talk about the price.
Simply put, the retail price of the various vaccines ranges from $3-37 per dose. Janky AstraZeneca down at the bottom, swanky Moderna at the top. My guess is you can get a discount for volume purchases.
Assuming you want to use the $20 Pfizer shot to shoot the whole world, the retail would be $320 billion for 2 shots for 8 billion people. As I write this, about a quarter of the world has at least one shot.
Estimates for administering the shots are hazy, but I’m going to make a very wild guess and say $10/dose, add another $160 billion for a total of $480 billion as a broad estimate of the cost of getting two pretty good doses into every arm on the planet.
Half a trillion isn’t nothing. But it’s cheap by comparison to whatever costs we incurred while waiting for vaccines. So it seems like we’re just arguing about who pays, now.
So, how much to buy the rights to a vaccine? After all, surely not paying retail will be cheaper.
Moderna has a current market cap of less than $100 billion. There’s some hand-waving here, but assuming you wanted to buy their vaccine patents and intellectual property outright, that’s a decent ceiling on the price. You could buy the whole company for that today, according to Mr Market, and there’s more to the company than just their vaccine.
That said, $100 billion gets you rights, not shots. If you turn Moderna into a non-profit that sells the the drugs at cost, presumably the retail dose cost is going to be, oh, let’s just say $3/dose, since that’s what AstraZeneca is already doing. So now using our guesses from above, you can vaccinate the world for $200 billion ($48 billion for two shots each for 8 billion people, $160 billion to administer the shots, $2 billion to the Foundation for Ryan Cousineau Having a Better Life, as a prize for coming up with this great money-saving idea).
The point is not to argue that we buy Moderna and nationalize it. The point is, these are the fairly solid ceilings on what it will cost to vaccinate the world. The numbers are large, but not crazy. Think of it as the budget of ten Tokyo Olympics. The current limits on vaccine distribution aren’t costs (or even distribution logistics, as far as I can tell), it’s supply. Whatever rate of production you see today was baked in by decisions made in 2020, and whatever production rate we see in October is baked in by decisions made earlier this year. It matters that the rate of production goes up, because with these vaccines, sooner is better.
Anyway, if someone says we “must” nationalize a vaccine, keep these numbers in mind. The price is bearable, and there may be an argument the First World should subsidize a few Olympics’ worth of doses, but if you really want to nationalize a vaccine, the least deranged way to do it is to just buy it out.