The other, and I think bigger issue, is who owns these patents given that a large amount of the work was done with public funding.
This is what I consider drama, y'all:
Moderna is offering to share ownership of its COVID-19 vaccine patent with the U.S. government to resolve the dispute, the vaccine maker said, and would allow the Biden administration to "license the patents as they see fit."
An NIH spokesperson declined Monday to comment directly on Moderna's offer, citing "ongoing discussions."
The company claims it had no choice under the "strict rules" of American patent law to list only its own scientists "as the inventors on these claims."
But the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases disagrees.
A spokesperson for the government research arm - housed within the NIH - said that "its own thorough review" had determined that scientists Kizzmekia Corbett, Barney Graham, and John Mascola also deserved to be named as inventors.
"Moderna has made a serious mistake here in not providing the kind of co-inventorship credit to people who played a major role in the development of the vaccine that they are now making a fair amount of money off of," NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins told Reuters last week.
"Omitting NIH inventors from the principal patent application deprives NIH of a co-ownership interest in that application and the patent that will eventually issue from it," said an NIAID spokesperson.
Public Citizen, a government watchdog group, penned a letter this month to the NIH urging the agency "to publicly reclaim the foundational role" it played in developing the shots, criticizing a July patent filing by Moderna claiming it had "reached the good-faith determination" that the NIH's scientists "did not co-invent the mRNAs" in their application.
Activists have been pushing the Biden administration to "reclaim" ownership over the vaccine, in hopes of increasing global access.
www.cbsnews.com
I really like that there is finally some push back against big pharma over this. We, as tax payers funded the NIH research. We should get something for that. This would be great to help us fund Medicare.