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Comment by LocalH | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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