People wait in line to receive the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine at a mobile vaccine clinic in the Brooklyn borough of New York, United States, Aug. 23, 2021.(Photo: Xinhua)

Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna are making combined profits of $65,000 every minute from their highly successful COVID-19 vaccines while the world's poorest countries remain largely unvaccinated, according to a new analysis.

The companies have sold the vast majority of their doses to rich countries, leaving low-income nations in the lurch, said the People's Vaccine Alliance (PVA), a coalition campaigning for wider access to COVID-19 vaccines, which based its calculations on the firms' own earning reports.

The Alliance estimates that the trio will make pre-tax profits of $34 billion in 2021 between them, which works out to over $1,000 a second, $65,000 a minute or $93.5 million a day.

"It is obscene that just a few companies are making millions of dollars in profit every single hour, while just 2 percent of people in low-income countries have been fully vaccinated against coronavirus," Maaza Seyoum of the African Alliance and People's Vaccine Alliance Africa said.

The three companies' actions are in contrast to AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson, which provided their vaccines on a not-for-profit basis, though both have announced they foresee ending this arrangement in future as the pandemic winds down.

AFP