STORY: Pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer

and Moderna are facing a "COVID cliff"

Those firms, along with others like

Gilead Sciences, AstraZeneca, and Merck

are estimated to have earned $100 billion over the

last two years from COVID vaccines and treatments

Analysts expect those sales could

fall by nearly two-thirds this year

Pfizer brought in $56 billion in revenue in 2022 from

its vaccine with BioNTech and antiviral drug Paxlovid

The company expects that to drop to $21.5 billion in 2023

Moderna pulled in around $18.4 billion in

2022 from its messenger RNA COVID vaccine

It expects revenue to drop to around $7 billion in 2023

Other companies like Merck and Eli Lilly have seen

a more modest impact from their COVID businesses

Quote from David Ricks, Eli Lilly CEO:

"We did fine with COVID. We made a little bit of money with it. What we did with that was we mostly reinvested it in R&D (Research and Development), and last year was a record R&D spending year for the company."