They're price-gouging so hard it surprised even Wells Fargo.

Wells Fargo analyst Mohit Bansal said the new pricing range for the vaccine could add around $2.5 billion to $3 billion in annual revenue for Pfizer.

"This is much higher than our assumption of $50 per shot, and even assuming $80 per shot net price in high-income countries, we see $2 per share upside to our estimates" from the new prices, Bansal wrote in a research note.

Price hikes like this are only possible because mRNA vaccine manufacturers refuse to release the patents and allow cheaper copies of the technology to be made, even though that would unquestionably speed access to more of the world. But releasing the patents would destroy the grip that Pfizer-BionTech and Moderna have on the mRNA vaccine market, preventing them from fixing prices like this. Both Moderna's and Pfizer's share prices have shot upwards after announcing this.