In late 2020, just before Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine proved highly effective, the company pledged not to enforce any patents on its vaccine during the pandemic. The company described the pledge as an effort to hasten the end of the crisis, and it deserved Moderna’s goodwill.
On Monday, Moderna announced it was “updating” its pledge, opening up the opportunity to enforce its patents in middle and high-income countries. The company said it would “never maintain” its patents for Covid vaccines in 92 of the world’s poorest countries, many of them in Africa or Asia, or against other manufacturers making vaccines exclusively for those markets.
It was unclear exactly what the updated enforcement might look like, or what threats the company is responding to, in part because no moderna vaccines are produced other than by the company itself or its contractors.
Moderna’s patent promise has yet to yield any results, in part because the company has not shared its vaccine formula or transferred its technology to manufacturers who could have produced it at a lower cost to poorer countries.
While South Africa is not among the countries protected from patent enforcement, Moderna will not attempt to block a World Health Organization-backed effort in South Africa to reverse engineer the company’s Covid vaccine, Colleen Hussey said. , a spokeswoman for Moderna.
Despite Moderna’s vow not to block that effort, Zain Rizvi of the advocacy group Public Citizen, which has been investigating Moderna’s Covid patents, said he is concerned that Moderna’s updated pledge could still “harm the efforts to make vaccine technology available in other developing countries”.
Moderna sold 800 million doses of its Covid vaccine to governments last year and generated $17.7 billion in revenue. The company has agreed to sell at least $19 billion worth of vaccine this year. Pfizer, which makes the other mRNA vaccine widely used in the United States and elsewhere, has a similar policy of not enforcing its patents in the world’s poorest countries.
Nearly a year ago, when vaccines were seriously scarce in low-income countries, the Biden administration backed a World Trade Organization proposal to waive intellectual property protection for Covid vaccines. That proposal, which the pharmaceutical industry strongly opposed, has made little progress.
In Monday’s press release, the company said it “remains willing” to license its Covid vaccine technology “on commercially reasonable terms” to manufacturers in middle- and high-income countries.