Bizarre Patent Tussles Over A Covid-19 Jab

Moderna's many intellectual property disputes over its vaccine highlight the need for a patent-free regime to fight the pandemic

- Latha Jishnu

IN THE Byzantine world of US pharmaceutical intellectual property (IP) rights, which has a model that is exported to and imposed in most parts of the world, the twists and turns in the case of Moderna's patent claims on its vaccine are riveting. Moderna is one of two startups—the other being BioNTech of Germany that has tied up with Pfizer—to have developed the new-tech messenger RNA or mRNA vaccines against SARS-COV-2. During the pandemic, these companies have become the stars of the fight against the lethal virus, even though AstraZeneca's traditional vaccine has done most of the heavy lifting.

But Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine has been caught up in controversies and, now, lawsuits over its patents. One reason for this is the huge helping hand it received from government scientists of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), in getting both the technology rights as well as the funds running into billions of dollars. Yet it excluded NIH scientists as co-inventors when it sought four patents on the vaccine (see 'Moderna's brazen patent grab on COVID-19 jab', Down To Earth 1-15 December 2021).