The fact that this is necessary, should invalidate any patent protection that Moderna (and Pfizer) have on the vaccine. Patents are supposed to work as a quid quo pro, you disclose the invention in exchange for a temporary monopoly. If it takes significant work to reverse engineer the invention, that quid quo pro hasn't been met, the patent should be considered invalid.
If Moderna and Pfizer want to protect the vaccine via trade secrets, from an intellectual property that's fine, but they shouldn't have any government defence against reverse engineering.
(Note: Talking in moral terms here, there is some legal support for the argument, at least in Canada (not sure about the US), but I wouldn't suggest that I could predict which way the case would go without a lot more information. For an example case along these lines from Canada, see: https://www.pharmainbrief.com/2017/08/fca-upholds-gilead-vic...)
On the contrary, if you read carefully the article, you'll see that Moderna went out of their way to maximize the good they can do. They stated multiple times that they will let anyone who wants to manufacture their vaccine to do so, without them pursuing patent protection. They also went into some details how do make the vaccine.
Now, no matter how many details one gives, for someone without manufacturing expertise in that domain, the details will be insufficient. Think for example at the famous Saturn V engines F1. Almost one hundred were produced, quite a number of them are still around in various museums, all the blueprints exist, yet no one can make them again, because some know-how was lost [1].
I don't think it's so easy for Moderna to just "share the vaccine recipe". At least not to such a degree to enable someone who admits they "never formulated a liquid nanoparticle" to start doing that just following a few pages of explanation.
Isn't it absolutely insane that we are resource constrained on solving a pandemic nearly 2 years into it?
The fact that the resource in question is a secret recipe is just astounding. If all of humanity worked to end this collectively, we would all be immensely better off. There shouldn't be moral questions about getting a third dose or sending it to countries without supply.
The reason for this is astounding and unbelievable profit based on decades of US federal research funding.
Moderna's most recent financial results: "Total revenue was $6.3 billion for the six months ended June 30, 2021, compared to $75 million for the same period in 2020"
Modena is using a lot of novel techniques that they have been pioneering for decades.
When a new technique is invented in molecular biology, it often takes quite a while for the expertise to percolate through the entire field. Often times, despite full protocols being published for the technique, a lab will adopt the new technique only when a person with prior experience joins the lab, and teaches everyone one hands on.
Thats just for small scale molbio that happens in small quantities on a bench top. Taking a technique through to large scale production, and doing it with high quality, and then also getting it to work under Good Manufacturing Process controls so that the thing you're making is suitable for injection into real living humans? That's an entirely different order of magnitude of difficulty.
Perhaps there's something that could have sped this up, but unless people are aware of the particular challenges that are being faced, it's hard to know what sort of intervention would have actually done this.
I think “secret recipe” is grossly underestimating the complexity involved here. It’s not like they added a pinch of cumin or something. This was greenfield lab science in March 2020, the fact that they’re producing as many of them as they are right now is stunning. If this were an easy process to scale up, why wouldn’t Moderna be doing so and capturing the profit? What’s the argument that they should divert a (possibly quite large) amount of resources to helping others produce it instead of focusing on making as much as they can?
Consider also the supply chain and logistics networks for getting materials to manufacturers and then distributing them all over the world in just a year's time.
While you might have a point about private companies profiting from US taxpayer funded research, I do not understand the purpose of comparing a company's revenue before their product was being sold to their revenue after their product started to be sold.
The social contract that has allowed the USA to DONATE 140 million vaccine doses to 93 countries is sorta built on the foundation of us having already supplied a dose to everyone domestically that wants one.. And getting our economic engine rev'd up again.
Again and again it's interesting to see the US step up when faced with these world wide challenges.
From bringing back peace and prosperity to Europe to protecting the western world during the cold war, it's something to see the country working hard fighting covid abroad, having invested resources for decades in fundamental research to finally be able to produce a vaccine like that.
This is... not really true. The US is indeed in the lead in COVAX donations at 45 doses pledged per million dollars of GDP, and that's laudable. But it's not like no other country is close; France follows closely on the US's heels at 44, with the UK not far off at 38, Germany and the Netherlands are at 27 and 29, and so on — https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covax-donations-per-gdp
Nor is it true that the fundamental research for all the major vaccines came out of the US. Moderna indeed was, but the Pfizer vaccine was developed by BioNTech (Germany), and the Astrazeneca vaccine was developed by the University of Oxford (UK).
I'm not disparaging what the US has done during the pandemic (I have issues with a couple of your other examples, but that's not for this thread). I do however take exception to the final sentence.
Astra Zeneca (UK/Sweden) has shipped over a billion doses, is massively (hugely) cheaper, and has production in 15 countries. And the reason for the cost (as little as a tenth of some others) is simple - not profiteering.
So likewise, not "only in the UK" either, but both our nations need to move on from our exceptionalism and the assumption (in general) that the rest of the world does less.
Weren't many of the vaccines that America donated actually AstraZenica? IIRC the US bought 100m and they never got FDA approval, so we just gave them away.
There's a difference between "making" or "shipping" a vaccine and "donating."
A lot of people are nitpicking or saying irrelevant shit in response to this, so I wanted to say I think you hit the nail square on the head.
There's a lot of countries with a vaccine uptake in the single digits, and if global health was a real concern we'd be doing something about it, or at least talking about it. Instead, as an example, Ireland's government are implementing a vaccine passport and buying 5x as many booster shots as the entire population... Ireland has a 90% vaccination rate.
Our pundits are talking mad shit about the 10% of unvaccinated people, blaming them for the whole virus, while other countries have a 99+% unvaccinated rate. There's sensible 'putting on your own oxygen mask first', then there's selfishness, and then there's bizarro-world whatever-the-fuck this is; beyond delusion and greed and terror.
> Moderna's most recent financial results: "Total revenue was $6.3 billion for the six months ended June 30, 2021, compared to $75 million for the same period in 2020"
Careful, not profits, revenues. It costs them something to manufacture the vaccine. WeWork and Uber have great revenues, but I wouldn't accept an offer from them with a share of the profits!
> If all of humanity worked to end this collectively, we would all be immensely better off.
True, and yet
> based on decades of US federal research funding.
One country seems to be footing the bill for the whole world (and it's not even where the pandemic originated). Other countries are free to finance cutting edge research and add a clause they own the intellectual property to it for use in their country.
Better to be resource constrained than solution constrained because we haven’t got one because the incentives in our economic system didn’t motivate the founders to create a Moderna in the first place.
Not really surprising because viruses are more economically efficient than capitalists. Outspending natural disasters is a bad time. Nature has a blank check to wreck our stuff, sadly
As Charlie Munger said: "Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome". The version of capitalism we chose to set up over the last 70-200 years isn't really well suited for these kinds of problems.
The Saturn V engines being impossible to reverse engineer always seemed suspicious to me. I think it's more about restarting the rocket program with current technology instead of reviving old rocket tech. Or maybe a budget cut pretext "it's impossible, why spend money on it?".
Edit: commented before seeing the link, that's actually their point 3:
> With the help of powerful computers and new technologies, we can do a better job today (if we can find enough money to do that). With the examination of Rocketdyne F-1 engines from museums and storage, today’s engineers did discover enough to create a new F-1B engine should it ever be built. Using modern computing modeling and manufacturing techniques, the new engine could not only be more efficient, it would be just as powerful as the updated but unflown F-1A at 1.8 million pounds of thrust. More importantly, it would reduce the number of manufactured parts from around 5,600 to just 40! And while increasing its reliability and decreasing costs in the process.
My (limited) understanding here is that the US patent doesn't grant a monopoly to Moderna internationally and that breaks down the quid quo pro here. Other countries can and probably will nationalize the vaccine production and not pay Moderna licensing fees, or offer a take-it-or-leave-it pittance.
I agree this is a major breakdown though and given the circumstances I wish Moderna could have just been paid off some small licensing fees and collaborated with this other company instead of wasting time reverse engineering a lifesaving vaccine.
From an IP perspective, if Moderna doesn't think the benefit of disclosing the invention is worth the value of the patent (and you present a coherent argument for that), that's ok, they can not have a patent. But we shouldn't let them have their cake (the patent) and eat it to (not disclose the invention).
From a broader world perspective it's also pretty terrible that time is being wasted reverse engineering this instead of licensing it during a pandemic, but that's largely a separate discussion.
They have publicly agreed not to go after anyone that uses that patent. Patent trolls effectively force their hands into applying for a patent, but they only bothered in the US due to how crazy our IP system is.
The only way they could have made this more open is to actively sent people to train other companies, but frankly their are several different vaccines available so it’s hardly in them.
There is no such thing as a worldwide patent. A US patent only grants protection in the US. Presumably they have applied for patents in several countries though.
> There is no such thing as an international patent.
Sure there are:
- ARIPO patents can protect in Botswana, Eswatini, Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda, Sao Tome and Principe, Sierra Leone, Somalia, the Sudan, the United Republic of Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
- GCC patents can protect in United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait and Bahrain.
- Eurasian patents can protect in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russian Federation, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan.
- EPO patents can protect in too many countries to list.
- Hague design patents can protect in too many countries to list.
The point that patents are regional is definitely true, and country specific patents tend not to provide protections in other countries. but I figured I'd mention that there are many multi-country regions which are certainly international patents. :)
I should also point out that while a 'US patent' might not provide international protection, most people looking for international protections will probably be using the PCT (Patent Cooperation Treaty) or other mechanisms for multi-country filings, with is another mechanism through which you can make one international application to most countries.
> Other countries can and probably will nationalize the vaccine production and not pay Moderna licensing fees, or offer a take-it-or-leave-it pittance.
That's just lazy: wait for someone to do the hard work and then just copy. Why not invest in research instead and contribute something?
Presumably there are parts which are patented and public (how the vaccine works in principle), and then there are parts which are not patented but a trade secret (how to actually manufacture it at scale). This kind of thing is very common.
not just common, but encouraged by the regulatory and competitive environment. big companies like ibm offer patent bounties, so employees are incentivized to break improvements up into the smallest possible elements that will pass muster with the patent office so that they can maximize the amount of bounty granted per advancement.
similarly, companies like to lay minefields of patents around any given technology so that if they’re the market leader, they can slow down competition, but if they don’t have the winning version, they’re at least likely to get some royalties for the patents they have.
I've seen this thing in other areas too. One particular radio telemetry system has all sorts of patents surrounding it dating to the 1980s, all of which leave out critical details of the system.
> If it takes significant work to reverse engineer the invention, that quid quo pro hasn't been met, the patent should be considered invalid.
So, company A patents something and discloses how to make it. It's an enabling patent, best-mode, etc.
Company A then makes significant further improvements needed to make the thing at scale. You're saying they should have to disclose this subsequent work?
Taking this article at face value, the company has not disclosed how to make the thing at all, not just how to make it at scale.
I would not suggest that the most efficient way to make it must be disclosed (if you want to patent the finished good but not the efficient manufacturing process), just a way.
The very act of providing the product to the market place is a sufficient disclosure of "how to make the thing at all" for anyone with a modest level of skill in this field. Moreover, there are plenty of detailed descriptions in Moderna's patent filings and other publicly available sources on how to make the thing at all. The issue is very much one of scale and I would wager that Moderna doesn't quite have the expertise either to reproduce their manufacturing pipeline at will. I have have personally witnessed a massive project failure in moving a therapeutic molecule from one manufacturing site to another, presumed identically equipped, manufacturing site. These things are not easy. It may be that this South African startup actually cannot use much of the information Moderna has on how to manufacture at scale because it only reproduces in Moderna's hands at Moderna's sites. This would be the expected outcome really.
> the company has not disclosed how to make the thing at all, not just how to make it at scale
They’ve also not patented everything, choosing to retain some of the most sensitive techniques as trade secrets. If this persists, we’ll see more pharmaceutical companies taking a Muskian approach to patents.
From the USPTO's Manual of Patent Examination Procedure: (quoting the patent statute): "The specification. . . shall set forth the best mode contemplated by the inventor of carrying out his invention."
And the Manual's explanation: "The best mode requirement is a safeguard against the desire on the part of some people to obtain patent protection without making a full disclosure as required by the statute. The requirement does not permit inventors to disclose only what they know to be their second-best embodiment, while retaining the best for themselves."
Note that all the teeth are gone from best mode, though. You're now "required" to disclose best mode, but don't face invalidation of a patent for failure to disclose best mode.
Well lets say you have a process that requires stage A and then stage B to make product C, but stage B can't be done without A, and the result of B isn't useful by itself. Then you patent stage A and keep stage B secret.
I'm not a patent expert, but this seems to break the social contract of patents. Perhaps there is something in the patent law that prevents this?
[edit] Apparently, I'm wrong, "utility" is an explicit requirement. But let me tell you, nobody ever asked me to justify the utility, not even a little bit. I think it's just assumed that if you're willing to pay the patent fees, it's likely to have some utility.
----
AFAIK there's isn't. You can patent a leash for rodents, and PTO is not going to say "it's not acceptable, nobody wants to put rodents on a leash". The only questions are whether your invention is novel and non-obvious, not whether it's useful.
As such, if you can patent stage A that produces <unuseful stuff B>, nobody will tell you that it's unacceptable because B isn't useful. The usefulness is a completely separate question, to be decided by the market.
A company could do that, but what advantage is there to doing that over simply keeping stage A a secret? By patenting stage A, you are awarded a temporary monopoly over stage A but also giving competitors a head start to reverse engineer stage B. By not patenting stage A, you don't get the temporary monopoly, but you also don't publicize anything about stage A that would give competitors the head start on stage B. So it's the same tradeoff that always exists with patents.
I would expect that any product with some degree of complexity (such as in Biotech) you have on the one hand patent protection of the application of the product and on the other hand hard earned knowledge on how to actually produce the product with efficient yield and consistency etc. (which you could consider trade secrets).
In theory a patent is where you provide full details such that another practitioner of the same art can replicate your efforts and in exchange you receive government protection from competition for a period of time.
According to the US patent office [1]:
The specification must include a written description of the invention and of the manner and process of making and using it, and is required to be in such full, clear, concise, and exact terms as to enable any person skilled in the technological area to which the invention pertains, or with which it is most nearly connected, to make and use the same.
If the patent is not detailed or clear enough to enable replication, then it has not met the requirements of the patent office.
Right. But there's no requirement that if you're a skilled practitioner of the art and you read all of the patents (seven in this case), then you'll be able to replicate any particular product that uses those seven (and perhaps many other patents).
You have to know those seven to replicate the Moderna vaccine, but there's no guarantee that knowing those seven will be enough. Moderna is allowed to use unpublished information as well, or unpatentable inventions, or patentable but unpatented parts/processes, or outsourcing, or purchased parts.
If they want a patent on the vaccine then they must provide "full, clear, concise, and exact terms as to enable any person skilled in the technological area to which the invention pertains, or with which it is most nearly connected, to make and use the same."
So the one patent on the vaccine should be enough, the other seven tools of the trade patents are a red herring.
"use unpublished information as well" nope that would fail the "full and clear" terms of a patent.
But what if they don't want a patent on the vaccine?
Moderna has patents on seven inventions that are used for making the vaccine, and I'm sure it uses parts or processes from other companies too. AFAICT it hasn't even applied for a patent on the vaccine.
AIUI they have no patent protection on their vaccines, but rather on some patented inventions (processes or whatever). That is, there is no requirement to make a product from exactly one single invention, or to disclose details of unpatented processes or parts of a product.
Part of the benefit of making a moral argument (rather than a legal one), is I can avoid giving an exact test for what should and shouldn't be patentable.
Yes, I think there should be some minimal "unit of invention", and that in this case it's pretty clearly the vaccine as a whole. "Part of the vaccine" isn't of benefit to society, so disclosing how to make that isn't meeting your end of the bargain.
Yes, I also think that there are probably other cases where a single product has two unrelated subsystems, and it makes sense you could have patents on both of them. For example in a cell phone, a different patent on the antenna and the barometer would make sense, since they really haven nothing to do with eachother and disclosure of each individually benefits society.
Is that clear? The contrapositive of that is that Moderna invented nothing in its first nine or ten years — none of the research that led to this vaccine counts as a patentable invention.
Morally, yes. A patent needs to have utility for the quid quo pro to make any sense, it's the end products that have utility. Patenting necessary intermediates without disclosing the end products serves to retard innovation by everyone else without giving them the reward once the temporary monopoly expires.
Legally, I would not be at all surprised to find out you were right.
There are many cases where a manufacturing process is not at all innovative but the end product is.
Consider the humble computer mouse. There was no manufacturing ingenuity needed to build it.
I don’t know enough about pharmaceutical manufacturing, but it’s quite possible Moderna and Pfizer don’t own any manufacturing IP (if I understand correctly some of their specialized equipment is developed by other companies). That means all they can really patent is their chemistry.
No it should not. The only reason it exists is because of the free market and private sector. Government produces nothing. Forced technology transfer to a criminal gang (government), will reduce future tech availability and reduce innovation. We will literally have fewer vaccines. The reward for producing the vaccine, will provide more vaccines in the future. Moderna is a better capital allocator than the criminals in government.
They would have financed it, and created it with or without the government.
However government cash, without Moderna would have never created a vaccine. Similar to how California, after 10 years and 20 billion dollars never created a high speed rail.
Sorry, but why can’t a complex invention be covered in part by patents and in part by trade secret and maybe some other parts of it is just public domain knowledge? I understand you are attempting to make a moral argument and not a legal one, but I’m not seeing your position because I don’t understand from what you have commentated so far why this is immoral.
the patents in question don't cover all the details required to make a working vaccine.
I do generally believe that patent owners should be required to license their technology for reasonable fees but many decide to set fees which are too high so nobody licenses it.
This seems like a complete distraction to me. Moderna's vaccine needs to be frozen between -50C to -15C for long term storage and can be stored refrigerated for up to 30 days [1]. What WHO vaccine dependent country is the WHO targeting with this? A lot of the refrigeration requirements rule out places with poor infrastructure. It just seems like a generics making power play.
Indeed, it seems like the mRNA vaccines got tons of traction because of a combination of high efficacy and first-mover advantage, but protein subunit vaccines like Novavax's (which unfortunately has taken forever to get to market) seem to be comparably efficacious, don't have the crazy cold-chain requirements, and depend on technologies that are much more broadly understood (adjuvanted protein subunit vaccines for other diseases are already available as generics manufactured in developing-world facilities). It seems like something like that would be a better reverse-engineering starting point.
I believe it's the future potential of mRNA vaccines that makes it a more valuable target. They can also be used against other, non-viral diseases, such as cancer.
Dry ice can be used to provide cooling and is relatively available or can be made available without too much difficulty so the drugs can stay cold in insulated transport 24 hours.
> Moderna has reiterated on several occasions that they will not enforce their intellectual property during the pandemic," says Friede. In other words, a manufacturer probably won't face a lawsuit for producing a vaccine that's virtually identical to Moderna's.
> Also, says Friede, compared to Pfizer's vaccine, there just happens to be a lot more information in the public domain about how Moderna's vaccine is made.
You want to know how to guarantee companies won’t be so generous in the future? What’s the benefit of being fairly open if it literally just means you will lose out compared to your competitors?
This isn't really about the COVID-19 vaccine. Moderna and company want to keep their secret sauce secret, because the mRNA technology is incredibly valuable for future vaccines.
In fact, FTA:
> Friede says it makes sense to set up more manufacturers of mRNA vaccines in particular because the technology appears so effective against COVID — and because it shows promise against other diseases including malaria and tuberculosis.
A primary goal of this is production of future vaccines using mRNA technology. There's a reason we're talking about Moderna and Pfizer, not J&J and Sinovac.
The general technology here is a big part of the company's asset value. If the WHO/UN/EU/etc wants to make it public, they should buy it from Moderna, not twist their arm to hand it over.
For those who might remember. During the Presidency of George W Bush, there were calls on removing the patents of Bayer's anthrax drug Cipro during the anthrax scare:
German drugs company Bayer, which makes the anti-anthrax treatment Cipro, has backed moves by the US government to promote rival antibiotics for the disease.
The decision, which sent the company's shares down 2%, takes the heat off the US government, which has faced calls to over-ride Bayer's patent by permitting rival companies to make cheaper versions of Cipro.
Concern has grown about the availability of treatments, as fears of an anthrax epidemic sweep America. A spokeswoman for Bayer, which plans to step up its production to 200m tablets over the next three months - enough to treat 10-12m people - said the company supported the relabelling of the antibiotic doxycycline as a treatment for all forms of anthrax. "We support this because of the threat to public health," she said. "It has nothing to do with our patent."
For several years afterward, lefotver Cipro tablets were the go-to antibiotic for veterinary use. I was told it was dirt cheap and had temporarily displaced amoxicillin.
This approach was tried in the past century, and what ends up happening is a bunch of IP paperwork but no one willing to do the work. It’s an interesting tragedy of the commons in terms of the game theory.
Otherwise, the person that figures out the hard work of scale up is the only one that doesn’t benefit, because the only winner is the fast follower. Governments don’t work nights and weekend to scale industrial supply chains (hint: because they can print money).
With Americans maybe. $0 from South African taxpayer money went to fund it, South Africa (and every other country) has 0 rights to it and get nothing. They pay if they want access.
If they wanted African supply of an mRNA vaccine, why didn't they just use The Odin's completely open recipe https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-25/one-bioha..., which was based on the Moderna vaccine. But, why would they want such a vaccine in Africa in the first place? The storage would be impossible anywhere outside of really rich medical facilities, and even that is not necessarily feasible. Why not go with funding vaccines by HDT bio, which have made mRNA vaccines but with metal particles in the outer lipid layer to allow for storage at fridge temps https://pipelinereview.com/index.php/2020090175739/Vaccines/... or something else?
Africa is not as poor, or as lacking in infrastructure, as you might think. A number of countries already have, or can set up, the cold chain requirements.
Indeed, South Africa (which is where this company is based) has safely administered millions of Pfizer doses as part of its vaccine rollout. Only the most rural areas are where a more stable vaccine like the J&J one needs to be used.
> As to why WHO has chosen to try to copy Moderna rather than the other mRNA COVID vaccine, which is made by Pfizer BioNTech, Friede says the choice was practical.
"Moderna has reiterated on several occasions that they will not enforce their intellectual property during the pandemic," says Friede. In other words, a manufacturer probably won't face a lawsuit for producing a vaccine that's virtually identical to Moderna's.
Wow. What an ass move. I'm not a fan of unlimited IP rights when it comes to something like a vaccine, but the WHO weaponizing a company's goodwill like this against sort of reeks.
> Moderna is facing growing pressure to share this type of know-how. Last week several U.S. Democractic senators and congress members released a letter pointing out that Moderna got a massive infusion of U.S. taxpayer funds to help develop its vaccine. At least $1 billion was for the research component alone. These officials contend that the Biden Adminstration can and should use language in the government's contracts with Moderna to force the company to divulge its process.
...
> WHO's Friede is less convinced that there will soon be sufficient COVID vaccine supply.
> But even if that's the case, he says it will still be enormously valuable to have cracked the code of mRNA production on behalf of low and middle income producers.
Hard to feel sorry about a biotech's inability to export IP protection capitalism during a pandemic because of statements they themselves made.
EDIT: "All in all, U.S. agencies committed about $2.5 billion to help develop Moderna’s vaccine and buy doses, according to the New York Times."
Feels like everyone's "square" if Moderna continues to sell doses to countries that can afford it and countries that can't produce bootleg versions, but I am open to arguments as to why that wouldn't be the case based on all available data.
The US may have gambled with the $2.5 billion dollar investment but it obviously paid off hugely and Moderna delivered essentially perfectly on their promises. I can understand why from their perspective they feel like they have already contributed quite a bit to ending the pandemic, at a very good price for the US taxpayer, and don't want to give away all their secrets.
I'm not defending the moral argument, but I think in terms of ROI you could only argue that Moderna got underpaid by the US government based on what they delivered.
I am just speculating wildly here, but I would think Moderna is worried about losing a competitive advantage to the "bootleggers" down the road, when producing boosters, and other mRNA vaccines.
Once the genie is out of the bottle those companies will be international competitors with your trade secrets probably forever- they might be able to lock it back down in the US market but good luck convincing other states to shackle their pharmaceutical industry that way.
The way I understand it, every single new infection is a tiny little lottery ticket for the virus to mutate. I don't particularly care about Moderna's profits. I want the vaccine to be as widely available as possible to anyone who wants it at a price (free) they are willing to pay.
If Moderna makes a few bucks along the way, that's great. If Modern a can't survive without massive profits, I am OK if they go away as well.
> I want the vaccine to be as widely available as possible to anyone who wants it at a price (free) they are willing to pay.
Then why don't you advocate for the US to buy those doses and send then around the world. Why don't you start a fund that buys vaccines and sends them around the world?
You want it all at zero cost to yourself. Now you can understand why Moderna doesn't want to be footing the bill for the entire world.
These companies didn't get the funding to make the vaccine from previous inventions, but from government funding, so this seems to be an unreasonable argument.
My comment never made a personal attack, but I do see how the snide way I criticized the parent poster's position could be inflammatory. I rephrased my response to be less inflammatory.
Hmm, I guess my instinct is just the opposite, it's shocking that anyone in the world should be denied the information needed to produce their own vaccines. Even without the larger discussion of IP, is there any doubt that Moderna and Pfizer have recouped their costs many, many times over already?
> is there any doubt that Moderna and Pfizer have recouped their costs many, many times over already?
For VC you need to get ~30x return from one company invested in to break even. Assumptions: 1 in 10 investments successful, 10 years, 12% per annum return needed by investors to cover variance (between returns of their different VC investments - risk vs reward). https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/01/the-meeting-that-showed-me...
I am guessing that greenfield pharmaceuticals is a more risky investment than tech VC, so perhaps a 50x return is fair. In a situation where there is massive consumer surplus (years of life), then an even higher multiple is probably fair.
Most people just don’t understand how much return is necessary to cover the high risk of failure. Of course, if they were mostly funded by government with no-strings-attached money, or the expected timeframe to success was very short, then the expected returns look a bit different.
Disclaimer: I hate big pharma as much as the next guy, but I try to think rationally.
Edit: anyone have a link to a calculation of consumer surplus in $ for the vaccination? To avoid a 1:10 chance of losing IQ (brain fog) or my sense of smell or a 1:1000 chance of death, I would expect that to be worth a lot to me.
Isn't saving lives part of the expected value? This is a genuine question. If you had the opportunity to save someone's life without any monetary reward, you would do it, right? Because lives are very valuable. I'm having a hard time imagining knowing how to lead billions of people out of a pandemic and just...not doing it, I guess because it might limit some hypothetical future business opportunity. Not being facetious, I literally don't get it and assume I'm missing something.
> Not being facetious, I literally don't get it and assume I'm missing something.
Moderna existed for 10 years and burned through billion(s?) of dollars before they earned any significant revenue. It doesn't matter how much I or anyone else want to save a life, I don't have 10 years and billions of dollars to spend attempting it.
I'm not asking Moderna to commit to 10 years of research, I'm asking them to release the thing they have in their possession this very moment, and accept the risk that they might face increased competition in 5 or 10 years as a result. This is a unique global emergency, I'm not saying everything they ever develop should be immediately in the public domain.
Also, billions of those dollars were US government grants.
> I'm having a hard time imagining knowing how to lead billions of people out of a pandemic and just...not doing it
Once your experts are trained and hired, their lab built and years of precursor research funded, sure, the final step is easy. But several of those layers want to be paid. If they never go into medicine, or never go into vaccine research or never build the labs, you can be heartfelt all you want when the next pandemic hits, it won’t give you vaccines in a year.
I don't really understand, why would people stop going into medicine or starting research labs? How would Moderna releasing their process crash the entire field? I'm not making a general argument that all medical research should be publicly available forever (although...), I'm making a very specific argument that in this global emergency, the benefits massively outweigh the risks. "Should I save the world or should I protect my brand" is a joke, it's not even worth asking.
I don't know if the polio analogy is overplayed at this point, but this is like polio. The vaccine needs to be freely available to the world. The absolute "worst case" is that Moderna faces increased competition in like 10 years and eventually goes out of business and its employees go work for different labs in different companies.
> in this global emergency, the benefits massively outweigh the risks
There is more than enough money to buy doses for everyone in the world at sticker price. This isn’t a debate about whether lives get saved, but about who pays for it.
Bluntly: no. Lives saved is probably not a significant component in the cost/benefit analysis when these companies are deciding how much they should invest in an avenue of research.
I understand that's not how they decide what to research, but I'm asking today, this second, why are they not factoring lives into the question "should I tell the world how to make my vaccine". I don't even know how to phrase this without sounding absurd. It's like a superhero letting the villain blow up a stadium because if the city is too safe then they might get bored and not be around when the next villain shows up in 20 years.
Do you know Peter Singer's parable of the shallow pond? Why is what you are puzzled about any different than asking yourself why you haven't donated everything you have right now to save lives in undeveloped parts of the world?
Because of the magnitude and rarity of the problem, the proven effectiveness of their solution, and the ease of releasing it. I am not arguing that every second of every person's life should be devoted to maximum lifesaving utility. I do donate a lot of my income, but I save a lot for myself because I'm a normal self-interested person. I'm not asking anyone at Moderna to make some enormous sacrifice, I'm asking them to maybe risk some potential future business opportunities. Relative to the problem I don't even consider it a sacrifice at all.
In my mind it's like an off-duty firefighter standing next to someone unconscious in a burning building and being able to easily drag them to safety, but deciding not to because it might give them back problems in a few years. It's an emergency, they know how to fix it and can do so easily, and the sacrifice is minimal compared to the danger.
Malaria vaccines are more effective than covid vaccines. Malaria kills a lot more people than covid. Why do you buy sushi instead of malaria vaccines? Relative to the problem I wouldn't consider that a sacrifice. Doesn't matter, I'm still going to buy sushi.
I get where you're coming from but people are just selfish with money, it is how it is.
I truly believe that what I'm asking Moderna to do is not much bigger than the minor sacrifices I make in my own life, mostly donating money and volunteering time. Tiny sacrifices! I have an incredibly comfortable life. If the people running Moderna did what I wanted, they would continue to have incredibly comfortable lives.
Most of the threads I've started have now devolved into people accusing me of being a hypocrite who's never sacrificed anything in my life, so I guess that's the end of the road. I still don't understand why anyone needs to be convinced that this obvious moral choice is a good thing to do, and I guess I never will.
For what it's worth, I don't think you're a hypocrite and I do sympathize with you, I wish they wouldn't pull this shit too. But they're a drug company, you have to expect them to act like a drug company. The number one thing they care about is profit.
Well you should rethink that. The people who invest in Moderna are just like you and that appeals to you because they're other people with their own money that you want to direct.
Pretty much your whole justification is that they've happened to invest in medicine and intentionally positioned themselves outside the burning building. You're investing in what? Yourself? Thin soup.
I guess the argument here is that only people as successful and powerful as the founders of Moderna are capable of judging them. You're right - despite my best efforts, I'm not there yet and probably never will be. If that's the bar, there's nothing more for me to say.
The superhero analogy is akin to saying "football is a game where you run a ball to the end of a field". It completely trivializes the realities of developing highly experimental technologies. Moderna doesn't get to fly in like an invincible superhero and defeat the villain with no real concern for whether or not they're going to be able to do it again.
But they already have the vaccine! There's no immediate risk, and the long term risk is not that serious. I guess the core thing I don't understand is why anyone would assume that releasing their process is equivalent to going bankrupt. Is this process all they have? Would releasing it eliminate all barriers of entry? Would the US government no longer be willing to give them grants if they become too philanthropic and save too many lives? Why couldn't they continue to be a wildly successful company?
It is a serious risk. Their manufacturing process and their tribal knowledge of it is all they have, save maybe political clout. Through this they prop up everything else. On top of all of this, they might not be able to convey the process to the extent needed for others to recreate it, even if they wanted to.
I work at a company that faces this as an existential threat; you might be able to knock off our products in single quantities, but because of decades of process knowledge that no single person (or even a committee of people) could tell you, you won't be able to beat us on price. Once you do that, it's over for us, and any beneficial technology that we planned on developing is going to need to be provided by our competitors, who don't actually have a culture of making improvements, only leeching them.
There are countless industries with high but tenable barriers to entry, and completely dealbreaking process knowledge that actually determines the viability of a company in that industry.
Alright, you've convinced me that it would be a real sacrifice, but it's still so obviously worth it. There's very little I wouldn't sacrifice to do what Moderna could do right now. The worst case scenario seems to be that Moderna employees with "helped develop the most effective Covid vaccine on the planet" on their resumes have to get new jobs, and new treatments based on their technology are developed more quickly now that the whole world can experiment with it.
If they can't communicate their process quickly enough because of the tribal knowledge, then no harm done, and at least they tried.
Ha. Maybe there's little you wouldn't sacrifice that isn't yours, but there's very little you would sacrifice yourself to save someone. For $500 right now you can save someone's life for a year. What seems to be confusing you is that you're not thinking of Moderna as real people.
I donate lots of my own money directly to people who need it. No, not all of it, because as I've said I'm a normal self-interested person like the people who run Moderna. That's why I'm not asking them to sacrifice everything they have, or anything close to that. They would continue to lead incredibly privileged and comfortable lives, just like I do.
I guess you already don't believe me, but I do make sacrifices in my own life, and if I were in the position of running Moderna, I still cannot imagine being unwilling to make another one. Doesn't seem like I can convince anyone here, but that's the source of my confusion - why does anyone need to be convinced? How is this not normal? When I say "I would sacrifice my job to save millions of lives", why is everyone like "sure buddy, you like money as much as the rest of us, we know you're lying".
Would you sacrifice hundreds of jobs (maybe even thousands if you account for second-order effects) for a chance (not a guarantee) that some other company will be able to use the technology in time to deal with the Coronavirus? Could you accept that there's a chance that new companies moving into this space will be much less cooperative if Moderna loses the fight after giving away their process?
There's a forest from the trees. Nobody here is saying that you're lying when you say "I would sacrifice my job to save millions of lives". The majority of us would probably do the same, but those aren't the stakes, and nothing is that simple. That's not what forcing Moderna to share their process is. This is a threat to an entity that has been fairly cooperative, and it is that way because of the chance group of people and attitudes that make that entity up. There is no guarantee that whatever comes next will want to play nice.
> If you had the opportunity to save someone's life without any monetary reward, you would do it, right?
There are some people who think like this[1], but this is very much not a mainstream consensus. At the margin, "lives" in the general sense (not "lives of people close to you" or "lives in your country") cost about $5,000 to save. A marginal cost of $5,000 to save someone's life does not say to me "society highly values all human lives".
COVID vaccine distribution might well come in under that $5,000 / person mark -- looking at the data I see that neither Ethiopia nor Nigeria[2] has even received enough vaccine doses to vaccinate everyone over 65. So it seems plausible that fixing supply constraints could result in saving a few hundred thousand lives worldwide. As such, it might be worth it for some effective altruists to pitch in a couple of billion dollars to buy the rights from Moderna, if that would actually lead to a large enough supply increase to justify the expense.
What I don't think makes sense is trying to change the legal landscape after the fact to obtain a bunch of vaccine doses off of Moderna's research without compensating them for it. When there's a pandemic, we want vaccines. Setting a precedent that you can't make money solving a pandemic would be a really, really bad idea. We want the opposite precedent, because we want lots of people trying the next time something like this happens -- as such, the options on the table should be "buy a bunch of doses" or "buy out the rights to make your own, and the consultants who have the domain knowledge to make it happen, at a price which makes the prior research worthwhile in expectation", rather than "try to avoid paying enough to make the research worthwhile in order to save a couple billion dollars when responding to a pandemic that cost tens of trillions".
[1] https://www.givewell.org/
[2] as far as I can tell, every other country that reports such things has received enough doses, though that doesn't necessarily mean they used those doses on the people at highest risk
What's more, in some cases you are required by law to at least try to save a life. For example, in some jurisdictions you are required to bring first aid to a victim of a car crash (assuming you won't endanger yourself in the process), failure to do so can result in jail time.
Concrete example is Polish Penal Code, article 162. Up to 3 years of jail time for failure to bring aid - there's a bunch of quantifiers that reduce the liability, but that's the gist of it.
I know Canada, at least, committed to buying vaccine doses really early on in the development by multiple companies - I think that even the failed vaccine development programs were in effect pretty heavily subsidized by governments across the world.
We want a robust economy around novel vaccine creation. What company would prioritize this kind of vaccine research that is high risk/high reward if you take away the reward?
You are changing the bet from double or nothing to "maybe a little bit" or nothing.
Nothing was never on the table. This was all financed with government money. So the only option is "a little bit", which in this context is still a fortune.
Moderna existed for 10 years and raised 3.2 billion before 2019 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moderna). The only government funding mentioned before then was $25 million (from DARPA in 2013).
I didn't say they shouldn't make any profits, just that I felt they'd already made enough that squeezing the developing world for more seemed unethical to me. For example[1]...
> Many technologies only exist because of the profit motive.
And many don't. It's not the only motive in the world.
> When should we destroy IP rights for the public benefit?
When we're in the midst of a once-in-a-lifetime global emergency, and the IP in question has a significant chance of single-handedly ending the emergency.
> “Keep in mind, when you destroy the profit motive, you destroy much (Not all!) of the motivation people have to build better things”
that’s a fairytale we’re told to keep things the way they are. every single person on earth has passions to do and create every day. that’s literally built into the biophysics of the universe. the profit motive shapes where we collectively apply our natural motivations, it doesn’t create the motivations themselves. we will always be building better things, it’s just a question of which better things. none of your list strictly requires a profit motive to have curious minds explore them.
I don't think it's wise to create an environment where medical advancements are gated behind there being enough people in the world that are passionate about pencil-pushing and dealing with the FDA and other regulatory bodies. Plenty of people go to work and get the bricks beat off them for 8 hours a day only because they get a sizable paycheck that they can then spend on things they're actually passionate about.
that’s a less than good-faith interpretation of the point i made, which is that, to the first order, people are intrinsically motivated to explore, experiment, and create. that doesn’t preclude the existence or usefulness of extrinsic motivation (e.g., wages), or even the negative effects of bureaucratic gatekeeping.
They're going to continue to explore, experiment, and create up until their curiosity is satisfied and they've run out of gas for dealing with regulatory bodies and running a business. It's true -- people will still research these things, and they'll find their answer, but then they'll require millions of dollars worth of menial man-hours and politicking that people do because it pays well, and not because it's their life's calling.
again, that misses the point. we don't 'run out of gas', at least not until we die. you're equating building a business with discovering and creating, but the building of businesses is a customary, artificial constraint, not a natural one, to creating novel discoveries.
i do agree with your implicit premise that profit motive can drive us to do things we don't otherwise want to do, but that again is because of constraints placed on us by the political economy, not natural constraints. we coerce the economy into producing profits via these constraints, not the other way around.
i get that you want to rail against the bureaucratic regulatory function, and i can agree that we get a lot of things wrong therein, but this line of reasoning doesn't get you there.
What if there are 3 people with the knowledge and skills to successfully setup part of the production process. Should their time be made available to anyone that asks for it?
Biotech investing has 50 misses for every hit. You don't have to recoup the cost of this particular investment, you have to recoup the costs that went into all the gambles that didn't pay off.
(unless you want that investor money to go into some stupid smartphone game instead, which is absolutely what will happen if you destroy the profitability of breakthrough vaccine improvements)
Well technically, US was in favour of abolishing IP and Germany was opposed to it a few months back.
But if you scratch under the surface a bit, the point they deviated on isn't really "should IP of a vaccine be a thing", but more "should Pfizer keep all the profit, or should BioNTech get some of it".
Because even if, say, my country made a perfect copy of a Pfizer vaccine, EMA/FDA could still put it in an unfavourable position if you're interested in traveling to the EU/USA any time soon. EU did just that with AZ vaccines manufactured in India (not recognizing it while recognizing AZ vaccine not made in India).
I don't think it's an ass move on the WHO's part. If anything, I think it's an ass move on Moderna's part, for not donating the vaccine to the public domain in full, without reservation.
I think Moderna is concerned about having its entire synthesis, mass manufacture, and delivery mechanism given away for free. This isn't just about the Covid vaccine, this is their entire business that the WHO wants access to.
It'd be one thing if the vaccine was an isolated innovation like a single piece of software that could be given away, but this is the company itself and everything they've been building. It's like the WHO is asking for the entire monorepo and instructions to set up the entire platform.
Also, once the WHO has the tech, it'll go into the hands of competing firms in Russia and China.
Maybe the WHO should be paying Moderna for more vaccines and asking for them to be provided at-cost?
But there's a global pandemic killing millions. How can they think their long-term business model is more important? I don't get it. Sure the WHO should pay for it, but if they won't pay enough to balance your projections, suck it up and save the world anyway.
If the result is the ultimate bankruptcy of moderna or their exit from that aspect of their business, what happens the next time we have a pandemic and the drug companies with the ability to develop a vaccine are reluctant to do so because their entire tech stack will be given away for free if they succeed?
You slow down and introduce uncertainty at the very point (the start of a pandemic) when you least want to do so.
Yeah, I mean this is just rephrasing the question. Why wouldn't a company attempt to solve a global pandemic even without the promise of eternal profit? These are exceptional circumstances. Even if pandemics become more common in the modern world, it's not like this is going to happen every 5 years. How can these people not be willing to make a sacrifice (where sacrifice here means saving the world but maybe having to find a new job in ~10 years).
They saved the world already. It's just not evenly distributed yet. It's a bit like me saying, "hey, you know climate change? that's an exceptional circumstance, well why don't you go live a hunter gather existence like our ancestors did to reduce your carbon footprint as much as possible?"
Because that would be a very large sacrifice with a very small benefit. Conversely, Moderna has the opportunity to make a relatively small sacrifice for an incomprehensibly enormous benefit.
If my becoming a hunter gatherer would single-handedly eliminate 50% of global emissions or something, I would do it in a heartbeat.
Ok sure, they should do that then. If they don't, then Moderna needs to step up and release the process anyway, and then write some angry editorials about how they deserved more money if they feel that way.
Why aren't you asking McDonalds to liquidate themselves, buy Moderna, and give it to the WHO for free?
You're picking on one entity here and asking them to give away everything. Moderna is a company that originally intended (and is following through on) developing cancer vaccines.
If Moderna's money goes to competitors and they lose cash flow, their ambitions here become harder if not impossible.
Also ask yourself why the WHO hasn't developed a vaccine for Covid and cancer by itself. It certainly has the funding to do so.
Ask yourself why European countries aren't dishing out money to buy Moderna and open up the patents.
I don't mean to criticize you, merely to get you to think about the interlocking and competing world-scale problem gradients. Nothing is ideal. There's always a bigger picture, and you have to think pragmatically.
No question that tons of other organizations are failing to make any kind of sacrifice. I'm picking on Moderna because this thread is about Moderna. We can't derail every discussion of "why isn't company X doing the right thing" with "well hang on, Jeff Bezos could just buy them and force them to do the right thing, so it's also his fault".
But also, in any discussion of "why doesn't X buy Moderna", a natural follow-up is "wait why doesn't Moderna just do this on their own if they can". Not an expert in hostile takeovers, but I'm pretty sure it would be a lot easier and more efficient for Moderna to just save the world themselves rather than wait for someone to acquire them and force them to do it.
So Moderna has to make a sacrifice and nobody else does?
See why that's unfair?
I'd say it's even worse given that this was their blood, sweat, and tears. An evenly applied tax would be fairer, but you're picking on the winner here and choosing for them to be dismantled. That discourages "winning". It's a very bad objective function.
The founders clearly believe they're worth more than 100B or they'd have sold out already. They have huge ambition. To cure cancers and other ailments.
It seems to me that you think the world can steer this innovation better. It's a very socialist approach. And again, I'm asking why hasn't the world solved this problem outside of capitalism? Why hasn't the WHO stepped up to the plate?
Oh my god, no, anybody with the ability to make this sacrifice should do so. This thread is about Moderna so I'm talking about Moderna. And it's barely even a sacrifice! Are they going to cease to exist if they make this process public? It's not their entire business, it's not going to affect them right away, the potential competition is years in the future. I'm not asking them to sacrifice any of their ambition.
You're right that it's a socialist approach. I don't know why the WHO hasn't bought them if they can. As I've said several times, they should and I hope they do.
The nanolipid process that Moderna won't give up is literally their entire business model. You can see the literal base pairs of the mRNA vaccine in the patent. The method of getting it to cells is the entirety of the secret sauce.
Alright, in that case it would be a real sacrifice, but it's still so obviously worth it. There's very little I wouldn't sacrifice to do what Moderna could do right now. The worst case scenario seems to be that Moderna employees with "helped develop the most effective Covid vaccine on the planet" on their resumes have to get new jobs, and new treatments based on their technology are developed more quickly now that the whole world can experiment with it.
If the WHO and it’s member nations want it why don’t they value that information enough to buy up ownership of Moderna? The reality is that the rest of the world wants a US companies innovation, but is unwilling to pay the true price.
I think it’s an ass move if you consider this as an one-time isolated incident but in a greater context of encouraging future entrepreneurs to invest in creating these kind of things, it’s a lot more complicated.
I think it's an ass move to not make the production methods public within markets where you're unlikely to bring in any significant revenue. All the big budget western nations have (mostly) vaccinated theirs - now the issue is rolling out an vaccine that's affordable as possible to the rest of the world. Part of that effort is enabling domestic production wherever possible in a reasonable manner.
But they are likely to make significant revenue with everything included in the requested disclosure. Corona isn't going to be the only virus that needs a vaccination. A lot of the methods and technology produced with this vaccine can be reused later, which will generate more revenue. Can no countries pool money together for the vaccine? Can the who not act as a broker instead of encouraging IP theft? Certain pieces can be shared and reused, just like in the FOSS ecosystem, but some things are gated behind paying for the time taken to produce the overall product. It's completely reasonable to expect compensation especially when it could be provided but they're just choosing not to.
The real problem limiting supply isn't the manufacturing, it's the supply chain. We now have factories optimized to produce vaccines as fast as the supply chain allows. If we start messing with the supply chains and divert inputs to factories not at the same optimization level then overall output could actually fall.
I'm pretty sure this is legitimately a "the market will fix it" problem. If a manufacturer isn't able to efficiently use supply this will likely result in some spoilage and backlogging - that will lower the effective price that manufacturer will be willing to pay (since buying extra stock just to have it expire is a waste) and allow the more efficient manufacturers to continue to consume necessary supplies at an efficient rate. Additionally, any added sustainable demand will result in an increase in profitability in the supply chain before that point - so existing manufacturers will be encouraged to expand and some new manufacturers may enter the field.
We might see a short term dip but I don't think that additional inefficient factories would lead to less overall production unless there was something weird going on like government mandates to supply inefficient manufacturers.
Is it worth optimizing for future output when the life-saving metric during a global pandemic is time-to-first-dose? There are only a few factories in the world that can make something as complex as an mRNA vaccine. There is literally a shortage in glass beakers and shipping lanes are backlogged. These supply chains are very fragile and helping stabilize those would do more for vaccine supply than what's being proposed here.
I would agree if I thought this would create a significant market disturbance - but I would assume the impact of a few more competing vax manufacturers will be extremely minor.
Employees don't disappear when a company goes out of business. If Moderna has to shut down because they were too successful and their process becomes a global standard keeping billions safe, then its researchers will go work for other companies working on new stuff.
I'm on the total opposite side of the debate. IMO, the IPO should never have been granted in the first place. Moderna and others had their risks covered, their opportunities guaranteed, exceptional liability limitations, expedited approval of their product, and a whole lot of other benefits. That's all appropriate, but treating this as private IP is not.
Meanwhile, I'm amazed to see international IP recognition hold. US governance is one hell of a stick, it seems.
Can't say I understand the role of the WHO, but if they give cover to some much needed IP dissonance, I'm pro.
"Weaponizing a company's goodwill" seems like a ludicrous, to me. If the will is good, who does this violate anything? The fact that IP concerns are holding up production is a crime. I mean that literally. I would convict.
Governments the world over should start to collaborate on this, in essence the message to all these pharmaceuticals should be: you will now do what's right or you will cease to exist. The corporate charter is a privilege, not a right.
My remaining questions though: did both companies say they wouldn’t license it or what the licensing conditions would be? My support of the actions are contingent on that.
> the WHO weaponizing a company's goodwill like this against sort of reeks.
This isn't 'goodwill', any more than a SaaS company offering their product for free to small companies or for a limited time is 'goodwill'. In fact, because Moderna is selling a drug, it could be said to be identical to a pusher saying "first taste is free". After the pandemic is over, whatever that means, it's a certainty that Moderna will price their drug as high as they can to recoup losses incurred during the pandemic. Plus, they've gotten free publicity, free efficacy and safety testing on a mass scale that they could never afford on their own, and a plethora of other benefits that they will definitely seek to monetize in the future.
I'm sure there's a certain element of unselfish humanitarianism involved, but the long game is profits, same as any other drug maker.
> Moderna will price their drug as high as they can to recoup losses incurred during the pandemic
That statement implies that they haven't been paid market price for their vaccine during the pandemic. Vaccines were not provided for free by any manufacturer. They were selling doses to governments as fast as they could be made making billions in the process. Pfizer is projecting $26 billion to $33.5 billion in COVID-19 vaccine revenue this year. Moderna is projecting $15 billion to $30 billion in 2022 COVID-19 vaccine revenue.
> Vaccines were not provided for free by any manufacturer. They were selling doses to governments as fast as they could be made making billions in the process.
> That statement implies that they haven't been paid market price for their vaccine during the pandemic.
You'll forgive me if I don't see how I implied they were giving away their vaccines. It's certain that the vaccines makers will do everything they can to profit from the mRNA breakthroughs that they could have cashed in on absent a global pandemic. A little goodwill PR now could go a long way towards keeping regulators and politicians off their backs as they use their government-subsidized inventions for private profit.
I wouldn't be surprised if writing the DNA part of the or any vaccin was the easy part, and that the growing, delivery and packaging parts are the hard parts. These hard parts can be reused for other vaccins, so Moderna would likely want to reuse those.
Isn't this what we criticize China for doing though? The alternative here would be that Moderna gets to operate within (ostensibly Africa?) doing business with them. Instead, Africa wants more favorable business terms so they make an end-around run to steal the IP from Moderna however they can. It's even worse that this is WHO-sanctioned IP theft.
It's just like China wanting more favorable terms with US companies leading them to steal US IP to make their own companies instead.
"Friede says Moderna is at least in talks with the WHO. And he remains hopeful the company will ultimately agree to provide some kind of tech transfer."
Likely because Moderna realizes South Africa is not the United States. a far greater percentage of resources would absolutely be dedicated in the public interest to replicating the drug and completely reverse-engineering it; its only a matter of time. companies like Moderna cant blanket NDA entire educational institutions as they study this, and pipeline the results directly into quantifiable quarterly revenue. there is a much more tangible demand for transparency.
Moderna will likely make a round of offers and counter offers depending on how molecularly obscure the drug is based on South Africa's progress. Skilled and talented South African (and international) chemists and biologists who can demonstrate a sufficiently advanced progress may be in fact rewarded by Moderna simply walking away from the negotiations out of a concern there would be no meaningful ingress of cash for whatever they could offer.
Either way, as the article states this isnt about Covid its about Malaria and other infectious diseases that can be cured through the same novel approach. diseases for which a cure just isnt in the financial interest of western Pharma giants.
This seems to be an ongoing theme when it comes to development and aid discussions. Countries seem to be willing to fork over some vaccines or some money but when it comes to actually creating the means for these countries to build up their own infrastructure and supply chains and to truly diminish their dependence you'll see the Moderna's and our governments start to flinch
I think choosing Moderna vaccine is a poor idea. There's no logistical capability to deliver something requiring specialised cold storage in poor countries.
Africa and Middle East eventually will be filled with vaccines requiring nothing more than a fridge to store, and are cheaper to produce. To see WHO spending money on an impractical moonshot is mind boggling.
Yeah; there are three vaccines developed in Cuba and two from China that meet that ease of distribution requirement, and Cuba, at least, has agreed to do technology transfer to countries that want to produce it. It's hard to find a good motivation for WHO here.
This kind of negates the argument that the drug companies shouldn't release the vaccine recipe because no one but the drug companies are sophisticated enough to manufacture the vaccine safely.
If other companies can reverse engineer it, then surely they're capable of manufacturing it.
I think this is a misleading headline. Recipe isn't a big thing here but the delivery mechanism of nano particles.
Products like Coke and WD40 are known for their secret recipes but recipes are out in the public. The difficulty is in knowing amount of ingredients, preparation method etc.
I mean even if you 'crack the recipe': The required facilities to actually produce the vaccine (incl. all the upstream suppliers and sub-contractors and logistics etc.) will not pop up overnight.
Depending on what part of Africa you want to talk about, they already have robust drug manufacture and transport lines in place. Ebola'll do that to you. The issue isn't the stand-up capacity so much as, well, the recipe for COVID-related manufacturing specifically.
Not sure I agree, the drug manufacturing is not equal drug manufacturing. Production of a small molecule therapeutic (e.g. Remdesivir) requires very different capabilities of biotherapeutic manufacturing (e.g. antibodies). mRNA manufacturing is a different beast alltogether.
AFAIK, the main issue is transport, not manufacturing capability. The reason the latter is so tightly controlled is because it's not difficult once the process is known. And African countries are experienced in the former.
Why not just buy out Moderna’s IP? Give them what they would make on this, $10 billion or $20 billion or whatever, and take the IP by eminent domain. Would still be a bargain.
I don’t think you can separate the COVID IP from their other IP as all of their IP is based on manufacturing lipid nanoparticle delivery vessels. If you took this IP, this rest wouldn’t be worth very much.
I’ve always wondered why we don’t see this type of corporate sabotage more often. We have the technology to leak documents anonymously, so all it would take is one mid-level employee that is capable of finding another place to work if the company tanks…
A company that got a massive transfusion of US taxpayer cash to help them do X suddenly deciding to screw over the very people who funded them? Where have I heard this before....
If Moderna and Pfizer want to protect the vaccine via trade secrets, from an intellectual property that's fine, but they shouldn't have any government defence against reverse engineering.
(Note: Talking in moral terms here, there is some legal support for the argument, at least in Canada (not sure about the US), but I wouldn't suggest that I could predict which way the case would go without a lot more information. For an example case along these lines from Canada, see: https://www.pharmainbrief.com/2017/08/fca-upholds-gilead-vic...)