JJ: Very simply, what is Moderna claiming it did, and how does that comport with your understanding of the invention of this vaccine?
PM: Moderna says that it independently designed the sequence used in the NIH/Moderna vaccine, what we might think of as the vaccine itself. The National Institutes of Health says that it sent over a sequence which Moderna plugged into its process. So it is a technical dispute regarding, essentially, authorship of the vaccine.
Now, what's not in dispute is that the National Institutes of Health and Moderna have been partners in this process for several years. And it's important but often overlooked: The National Institutes of Health are the world's leading funder of biomedical research, with about $40 billion taxpayer dollars invested every year in products that are eventually sold, largely under monopoly conditions, by the pharmaceutical industry.
In this case, federal scientists pioneered research into coronaviruses long before COVID-19. You recall that we had SARS and MERS, and were aware that there was a coronavirus threat, and it was the federal government that pushed much of that research ahead, and also played a role helping pioneer the various vaccine platforms, including MRNA, which has proved so effective.
So in this case, we have a dispute over who is the inventor of the core patent at the heart of the world's most effective COVID-19 vaccine. And NIH and Moderna just don't agree. And we are now starting to get rumblings out of NIH that perhaps they will take this to the next level, and seek a legal resolution. What we understand is that the company and the U.S. government have been fighting about this behind closed doors for a year now.
JJ: What is the meaningful impact? What would it, for instance, limit the U.S. government from doing if Moderna gets sole credit for invention here? And what would it allow Moderna to do?
PM: If the U.S. government is a co-inventor, it has more formal power, as well as more informal leverage, to insist on certain uses of the vaccine, to license the technology to more manufacturers worldwide, to help scale up production, for example. Or, and to your initial point, to insist on royalty payments to the government in exchange for Moderna's use of some of this publicly funded technology.
The truth of the matter is that the NIH and the U.S. government actually have broader powers than just what are in this patent. And we believe and have said all along that the U.S. government, under its contract with Moderna, or under the Defense Production Act and the Bayh/Dole Act, and other powers under existing law, has the power to share key vaccine information, license other producers, perhaps simply share the entire NIH/ Moderna vaccine recipe with the World Health Organization, to see production scaled up and this key invention made available to all the world's people, who so desperately need it.
But there's no doubt that, in reputational terms, in terms of the story that is told, potentially in terms of dollars, the issue of who really invented the vaccine just has great salience and implications for what kinds of decisions the government makes about that power that we believe it has.
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You know, worldwide, more than 10 million people so far have died as a result of the pandemic. And a core issue there is that there have not been enough vaccines to go around. And NIH/Moderna is the people's vaccine, or should be the people's vaccine–publicly funded, publicly pioneered, public science leading the way, and even running the clinical trials. Taxpayers paid for 99% of this vaccine's development.
But Moderna is trying to turn this people's vaccine into a rich people's vaccine. It has been available primarily to wealthy countries, very few doses going to COVAX or to the global relief effort, and the technology not being shared with the World Health Organization, or others that could build on it.
So that's what's at stake, and from the beginning of the pandemic, unfortunately, the U.S. government's position has been to be extremely deferential to corporate interests, rather than noting the scale of the crisis, and noting the government's own involvement, and saying, you know what? We are co-owners of this vaccine, and we shall make it available to the world, because the crisis calls for that.
Our position always has been that the U.S. government can compensate Moderna for its investment and its scientific engagements, but that we should not allow, that humanity cannot afford, for such an important medical tool to be held corporate confidential, and limited in its rollout at this time.
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