Hacker News Reader

Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

View on HN

> 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."

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.

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.

What do you think will happen during the next pandemic if the companies who managed to come up with a vaccine go bankrupt from this one?

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.

I agree. Paying them to invent the vaccine was a good idea. Paying them to mass produce and deliver the vaccine is a waste of money.

> 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.

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?

How many Modernas and Pfizers tried this and failed?

The expected value of work like this should be greater than one on average, not just close to one among the successful attempts.

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.

At some point making money shouldnt be the focus. Thus was a global pandemic.

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.

> This was all financed with government money.

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).

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

> There's very little I wouldn't sacrifice

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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

Many technologies only exist because of the profit motive. When should we destroy IP rights for the public benefit?

- 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

> “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.

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]...

1: https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/21/business/covid-vaccine-billio...

> 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.

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)

Denied is doing a lot of work 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?

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).

> 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.

I read Moderna's position as encouraging this behavior. Otherwise, what would be the point of publicly asserting that they will not enforce their IP?

GSK.

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].

[1] https://www.gsk.com/en-gb/about-us/vaccines/

GSK is partnering with CureVac whose vaccine is still in trials:

https://www.gsk.com/en-gb/media/press-releases/second-genera...

CureVac has abandoned further development.

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 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.

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.

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.

Glad someone else thought so! I though I was crazy, for a second, thinking that people not dying was more important than some IP rights.

Millions more will die if all of the biotech firms leave the business because they can't fund the research.

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.

Half the founders of Moderna just made the 'richest people in the world's list.

Innovators are going to be just fine.

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.

The WHO can absolutely buy the entire process.

Moderna is a public company. It will cost them, at current time, $134 billion.

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 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.

I see, so long as it's someone else's sacrifice, it's fine, they should do that.

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.

Both morally and, in most countries, legally, patents can be broken in cases like this (severe undersupply, inaccessibility and urgency).

The WHO should be more concerned about forcing hostile countries to respect that right rather than look for silly workarounds.

Well... this is a contested topic, I suppose.

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.

>US governance is one hell of a stick

You misspelled military

What's the point of the company extending that goodwill if it's improper to hold them to it?

If I say I'll give anyone that asks $10,000, is it wrong for people to ask for it?

You know what reeks even more? Dead people.

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.

https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/pfizer-moderna-turn-up-c...

> 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.

Not all of them:

AstraZeneca vaccine - was it really worth it?

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56570364

> 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com