Pfizer reaped nearly $100 billion from selling COVID-19 vaccines and treatments to U.S. taxpayers and foreign governments — now it plans to get richer, sinking the cash into developing and marketing lucrative drugs for everything from obesity to migraines.

It just announced it will triple or even quadruple the price of its COVID-19 vaccine once it goes on the commercial market next year. Meanwhile, the company is inundating doctors and pharmacists — and consumers — with advertising touting its COVID-19 drug Paxlovid.

“Pfizer is a remarkable marketing machine. They have an incredible ability to make the most of molecules and get them adopted,” said Timothy Calkins, a professor of marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

While conducting its own research, Pfizer fattened its development portfolio in the past two years by buying companies that already had developed promising drugs. The company hopes these purchases, and its own work, will give it $25 billion in new annual revenue by 2030.

Meanwhile, the company has treated investors to $25 billion in dividends over the past three years and spent $9 billion jacking up share prices with stock buybacks.

All this is due to the huge profit bulge from its COVID-19 products, which has enabled Pfizer to outpace Johnson & Johnson as the biggest industry revenue earner so far in 2022.

From late 2020 through September, Pfizer earned about $80 billion from sales of 3.8 billion COVID-19 vaccines and Paxlovid, and the company expects an additional $15 billion in the remainder of this year.

Until recently, investors had been predicting that number would fall to around $11 billion annually by 2026, but Pfizer’s recent commercial pricing announcement increased that figure, potentially, by up to $3 billion, according to a Wells Fargo analysis.

Still, “from the investor’s point of view, the focus is not on covid as much at this point. The focus is, what do they do with this money and expertise?” Bansal said, and how to “use it to grow their core business.”

To grow that core, Pfizer since last year has acquired several midsize companies with promising or licensed drugs. It spent $11.6 billion for Biohaven, whose migraine drug Nurtec ODT brought in $324 million in the first half of 2022. Pfizer predicts up to $6 billion in annual revenue from the drug.

Its hopes are also high for Oxbryta, a sickle cell anemia drug produced by Global Blood Therapeutics, which Pfizer bought for $5.4 billion.

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