Eek. You have two very poor assumptions (sorry).
1) "Especially given our objective is probably not maximising profit (ethnical consideration)". You are wrong here.
All companies have the objective of maximizing profits. All companies have the incentive to PRETEND that they don't.
If you do some reading, you'll see that a lot of these promises by vaccine companies to keep prices low only go until July, 2021...when less than 10-20% of the developed world population will likely have been vaccinated. These companies still want to make money
2) "The government has a budget constraint". Not at all! The government has tons of $ to throw at this problem! Operation Warp Speed threw billions at this. Heard of Kodak? Heard of their $765 Million Dollar Moment? So, the US government does not have a budget constraint in anything that involes 1) Public image (i.e. pandemic) and 2) Military
Sorry to burst the bubble there!
Now, given this news, you now know the objective is to maximize profits without appearing to in the context of a government willing to pay a lot. How does this change your framework :)
Clarifying questions are key here!
(edited)
Thanks, that's very insightful. I have a follow up question: How do we structure the tree? I was thinking 1) Define objective 2) Explore price under value/cost/competitor based pricing 3) Choose one pricing strategy given our objective. But it seems after we defined our objective (for example, not revenue maximisation but to establish a ethical brand image), then it seems we cannot price by value but better to go with cost. In this case should I still go through the value creation discussions? Another problem I have is how to price based on cost - normally in the COVID case, my approach is - aim to recover R&D in 2 years, assume a $xxx mn of Fixed cost and $xx Variable cost, then assume a coverage of 10% population each year (given capacity), with COVID disappearing in around 5 years (when the vaccine will no longer make money). Do you think it is reasonable? Kind of feel it's too simplistic...