WHO asks South African startup to replicate Moderna's mRNA vaccine
npr.org
npr.org
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...)
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?
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.
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.
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."
(It's been a few years since I did patent work; a quick search in scholar.google.com didn't reveal any case law on point.)
And in a close case, in jurors' minds, evidence of a best-mode failure might help tip the balance against validity on other grounds.
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?
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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.
It'd be interesting to dig into the inventor's and patent attorney's files on that score.
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.
it’s perverse.
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 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.
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.
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.
For some basics of how the PCT works, see:
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?
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).
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.
[1] https://www.uspto.gov/patents/basics/general-information-pat...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Do you think there should be such a requirement?
they have patent protection on some elements of the vaccine, but the formulation or method for formulation (i.e recipe) is a trade secret?
am I understanding correctly? because if so, then yeah it doesn't seem like Moderna's actually doing anything wrong.
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.
Legally, I would not be at all surprised to find out you were right.
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.
[1] https://ourplnt.com/remake-rocketdyne-f-1-engine-humans-moon...
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"
https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-d....
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.
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.
Only in America!
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed#Companies...
There's a difference between "making" or "shipping" a vaccine and "donating."
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.
It really isn't. You need to widen your news sources.
Foreign companies also received significant investments from the United States [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed#Companies...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Moderna has released the sequence.
The ‘recipe’ is how to actually make it at scale without denaturing everything.
This is what takes the billions of R&D investment and kills most research programs (also called the ‘valley of death’ in innovation group research).
If the WHO/UN/whomever wants to make that general technology public, they should buy it from them.
In the interim, Moderna has said it would help anyone manufacture the covid vaccine.
What the WHO is asking for goes well beyond that.
OP's article is just an anti-pharma hit piece.
1. https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/info-by-product/modern...
> 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?
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.
We need to reward tech creators, not punish them.
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."
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2001/oct/23/anthrax.bus...
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).
Moderna would be a small biotech company were it not for covid…
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.
"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.
...
> 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."
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/11/24/fac...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/16/health/Covid-moderna-vacc...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/pfizer-moderna-turn-up-c...
Not all of them:
AstraZeneca vaccine - was it really worth it?
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.
The expected value of work like this should be greater than one on average, not just close to one among the successful attempts.
You are changing the bet from double or nothing to "maybe a little bit" or nothing.
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).
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 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.
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.
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.
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 get where you're coming from but people are just selfish with money, it is how it is.
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.
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.
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 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".
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.
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.
Also, billions of those dollars were US government grants.
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
- IP for the best vaccines, vs worse ones otherwise available, so we are all healthier
- Higher yielding crop seeds, vs worse lineages, so that we can all eat better
- Efficient water purification techniques, so that we all have clean water cheaper
- Metallurgy for high performance alloys used in turbines and aircraft structures, so that we can all build safer airplanes for less
- Software to detect early cancer or heart disease from blood markers, so that we can prevent disease
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 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.
1: https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/21/business/covid-vaccine-billio...
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.
(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)
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?
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).
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.
I wonder if this is exactly why GSK never released a COVID vaccine even though they are the largest vaccine producer in the world [1].
https://www.gsk.com/en-gb/media/press-releases/second-genera...
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.
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.
Innovators are going to be just fine.
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?
Moderna is a public company. It will cost them, at current time, $134 billion.
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.
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.
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?
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.
You slow down and introduce uncertainty at the very point (the start of a pandemic) when you least want to do so.
If my becoming a hunter gatherer would single-handedly eliminate 50% of global emissions or something, I would do it in a heartbeat.
The WHO should be more concerned about forcing hostile countries to respect that right rather than look for silly workarounds.
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.
You misspelled military
If I say I'll give anyone that asks $10,000, is it wrong for people to ask for it?
It's just like China wanting more favorable terms with US companies leading them to steal US IP to make their own companies instead.
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.
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.
If other companies can reverse engineer it, then surely they're capable of manufacturing it.
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.
While we're on the subject:
https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2020/07/22/covid-19-remdesi...
https://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/video/expensive-drug-world-...
capitalism is wrong, this is the way farma get profits