Moderna Sues Pfizer Over Covid-19 Vaccine Patents (npr.org) 68
The vaccine manufacturer Moderna sued Pfizer and BioNTech on Friday, claiming that its rivals' Covid-19 shot violates its patents protecting its groundbreaking technology. NPR reports: The lawsuit alleges the two companies used certain key features of technology Moderna developed to make their COVID-19 vaccine. It argues that Pfizer and BioNtech's vaccine infringes patents Moderna filed between 2010 and 2016 for its messenger RNA or mRNA technology.
All three companies' COVID-19 vaccines used mRNA technology which is a new way to make vaccines. In the past, vaccines were generally made using parts of a virus, or inactivated virus, to stimulate an immune response. With mRNA technology, the vaccine uses messenger RNA created in a lab to send genetic instructions that teach our cells to make a protein or part of a protein that triggers an immune response. In October 2020, Moderna pledged not to enforce its COVID-19 related patents while the pandemic was ongoing, according to a statement from the company. In March this year, it said it will stick to its commitment not to enforce its COVID-19 related patents in low and middle-income countries, but expects rival companies like Pfizer to respect its intellectual property.
All three companies' COVID-19 vaccines used mRNA technology which is a new way to make vaccines. In the past, vaccines were generally made using parts of a virus, or inactivated virus, to stimulate an immune response. With mRNA technology, the vaccine uses messenger RNA created in a lab to send genetic instructions that teach our cells to make a protein or part of a protein that triggers an immune response. In October 2020, Moderna pledged not to enforce its COVID-19 related patents while the pandemic was ongoing, according to a statement from the company. In March this year, it said it will stick to its commitment not to enforce its COVID-19 related patents in low and middle-income countries, but expects rival companies like Pfizer to respect its intellectual property.
Pfizer has the lawyers (Score:2)
Re:Pfizer has the lawyers (Score:5, Insightful)
And by "vetted" you mean release information on any possible side effects one might have by getting the vaccine. The same information which is plastered all over the net [hopkinsmedicine.org] and is readily found [cdc.gov] by anyone who dared to look.
As for effectiveness, I don't know. It's pretty difficult to judge the effectiveness of a vaccine when the documentation is out there [cdc.gov] for all to look at.
But hey, this was all done under the con artist who wanted everything done at warp speed so clearly all this information was available because he wanted nothing but the best for the American public.
Re:Pfizer has the lawyers (Score:5, Interesting)
Do you even read your own links? It would take 75 years to prep the data with their current level of staff. This is one of the medical biggest trials in history and all the notes are handwritten and require human eyes to remove personal details. It was a request for more staff.
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Re:Pfizer has the lawyers (Score:5, Informative)
"Two-doses of Pfizer’s or Moderna’s vaccines are only about 10% effective at preventing infection from omicron 20 weeks after the second dose, according to the U.K. data."
Also this just in, the 2018 flu vaccine is not effective against the predicted 2022 flu strains expected to be floating around later this year. Absolute shock.
It's almost like we have to keep making different ones depending on which flavor of virus is expected to be floating around. [msn.com] The FDA is still developing the official process for seasonal updates for COVID-19 vaccines, in the mean time, the FDA is granting exception in the booster development [yahoo.com] but at some point we will have a solid process for seasonal SARS-CoV-2 vaccination just like we have for the flu.
So the link that you provided only applies to the original authorization vaccine which targeted the original strain. So that it doesn't perform as well to a eighth generation mutation of the virus should surprise nobody. However, BA.4/5 variation of the vaccine due this September are indicated to provide as much protection against the current variants as the original vaccine provided to the original virus.
Pfizer sure was open about their science
What the literal fuck are you talking about here? This is a FOIA request for information from the FDA, none of it has anything to do with Pfizer. And one of the biggest issues is that the current employment for the FDA's FOIA department is zero employees and you have Congress to thank for that funding they didn't give. So yeah, it'll take a lot of time for zero dedicated people to work on a FOIA request. Perhaps you should write Congress to give a bit more funding in that regard if you are really chomping at the bit for that information. And this isn't something new, the FDA has been woefully understaffed since early 2000s and dropped to zero employees in FOIA in 2003. Hence the reason we keep hearing about how long it takes the FDA to fulfill FOIA requests [uscourts.gov]. But what's even more interesting, the group Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency has a lot of doctors that are also in Defending the Republic that had their FOIA denied. And this shouldn't be surprising that the same group of people account for the majority of FOIA requests from the FDA. Because this is literally the same tactic they used before the 1986 NCVIA and this is the exact same tactic they are using on VAERS data.
You have to understand that this group is just flooding Government agencies with requests and motions, not to actually gain any real data, because none of them have ever published anything based on the information that they have received. They just want those documents from the FDA to busy resources at the FDA. And that's why Congress doesn't fund it because it would be way more useful to just burn the cash and use the heat generated to boil water than to fund FOIA requests that these people will just suck 100% of their time up.
I mean you're so willing to think the Government is covering up stuff, and okay sure I'll give that to you if you want. But these people who are filing the FOIA request, they're just going to shred the data once they receive it, because then if you have actual data, they couldn't sell you their power crystals or whatever snake oil they want to sell you. It's like the gun lobby, the NRA doesn't want less guns because that reduces their profit and the anti-gun lobby doesn't want actual gun reform because then people will think guns are safe. Like nobody is the good guy here. Those doctors suing for the FOIA, they will never release the data they receive because they
Re:Pfizer has the lawyers (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to put on a vaccine subscription plan and get injected every 6 months for a virus that kills 0.03% of the population (when there is a 0.8% turn-over rate), knock yourself out.
I mean I do that for the flu already just every year and very likely COVID will become a once a year outbreak like flu. So I mean, I'm not sure how this is some groundbreaking thing you're trying to make it out to be. And more so, I get stuck every two months for donating blood and I go and get stuck every three months to track my liver. So I mean, adding two additional pokes per year is next to nothing for me. The off shelf cost of a flu vaccine for me is like $6 and the COVID vaccine is likely to be somewhere close to that in price, so most people literally spend more on Netflix per month than the cost of these shots per year. I mean seriously, what point are you trying to make here? Because you've not made any good ones.
Re:Pfizer has the lawyers (Score:5, Insightful)
> Also this just in, the 2018 flu vaccine is not effective against the predicted 2022 flu strains expected to be floating around later this year. Absolute shock.
This is only a shock to people that bought into the vaccine as a solution. Everyone else seen this coming.
Correction: This is only a shock to caricatures of people who bought into the vaccine as a solution. Everyone who actually understands how vaccines work knew that there was a chance of vaccine escape occurring before the vaccine could bring COVID-19 under control. That's why everybody was rushing to try to get the vaccine deployed internationally as quickly as possible. It was always a race against the clock, and everyone knew it. Everyone.
Umm... COVID-19 has already killed more than 10 times that many people in the U.S. (about 0.315% of the population), and I doubt everyone in the U.S. has been exposed to COVID yet, which means that number will go up. Maybe you should start getting your medical facts from actual medical professionals or credible news sources, rather than from anti-vaxxer propagandists.
Re: Pfizer has the lawyers (Score:2)
Most people who ended in ER woth Covid19 had 'hypertension' which is the euphemism for fat, unhealthy slob.
Ooopps, I used the F word! The police needs to 'check my thinking'
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What the literal fuck are you talking about here? This is a FOIA request for information from the FDA, none of it has anything to do with Pfizer.
My thought exactly. This has everything to do with Pfizer. Pfizer commissioned and ran the studies. It's Pfizer's data that they have.
You have to understand that this group is just flooding Government agencies with requests and motions, not to actually gain any real data, because none of them have ever published anything based on the information that they have received.
Motives of filers are irrelevant. Sane government institutions have FOIA aware workflows enabling them to preemptively dump data as a matter of course. They don't have to answer endless FOIA requests all they do is point to a publically accessible website.
There is no reason whatsoever data requested of FDA in the Pfizer FOIA is not made available by default as a matter
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It's pretty difficult to judge the effectiveness of a vaccine when the documentation is out there [cdc.gov] for all to look at.
Date of publication: April 28, 2021 -- before they had long term real-world data
Fast forward to January 10, 2022:
"Two-doses of Pfizerâ(TM)s or Modernaâ(TM)s vaccines are only about 10% effective at preventing infection from omicron 20 weeks after the second dose, according to the U.K. data."
This has been one of my public messaging pet peeves throughout post vaccine pandemic. The persistent focus in the media on meaningless metrics like antibody levels and who isn't getting infected post vaccination instead of the things that matter. (e.g. Who isn't being carted off to hospitals and morgues)
This was done quite calculatingly and deliberately to push social narratives around the idea vaccination means you are no longer a threat / disease carrier to the rest of society.
Once efficacy became worthl
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Some people are just so in love with their own misconceptions that they do not even try to find out what is actually true. That basically is the only real problem the human race has: Far too many morons that think they are smart.
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isn't it way way more scientific to assume that during this massive pandemic millions and millions of people have died presumably from the vaccine for the disease causing it? asking for a friend
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... and impact potential profits? Are you crazy?
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Just your standard patent fight. Either they'll settle out of court, and licensing rights will be firmed up with big fat checks, or it will go to court and left to the vagaries of judges and juries. I suspect the solution will ultimately be the former.
Never mind that the technology one way or another has been largely paid for by the taxpayers of multiple nations.
Re:Pfizer has the lawyers (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps under normal circumstances,but I think the last thing anyone would have wanted was for patent issues to delay development and deployment.
Imagine Pfizer being asked about their progress and them admitting they were waiting on a legal agreement to proceed. Not even Moderna would have wanted that outcome, as the public would be coming for blood and demanding measures that may have hurt long term viability of drug patents.
Even knowing about the risks, Pfizer may have made the decision to proceed, because the government would probably step in to provide them at least some protection, perhaps reducing the windfall, but leaving the Pfizer vaccine overall profitable in spite of a payoff to Moderna eventually.
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...Not even Moderna would have wanted that outcome, as the public would be coming for blood and demanding measures that may have hurt long term viability of drug patents.
Yeah. Instead the public is either dead or suffering from repeat infections. When you're in the middle of a global pandemic, all bets are off.. In other words, these companies should have never been allowed to secure patent protections for this shit-uation.
The CDC or WHO should probably have authority over that, but we clearly can't rely on them. Even for shit we know they are responsible for.
Hippocratic Oath my ass. Prove your oath to your craft and make pandemic patents downright illegal. Politics d
Re: Pfizer has the lawyers (Score:5, Informative)
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I'm sorry, were you reinforcing just how fucked up the patent system is, or supporting the notion that this was more a plandemic?
I couldn't tell right away. Oh, and exceptions exist. You know, for once-every-100-year events.
Re: Pfizer has the lawyers (Score:2)
By that theory no large company would ever get sued and lose. There is so much gray area and dice rolling in the law. A lot of it depends on what judge you get and which attorney is best at marketing/selling your case. Also if you listened to lawyers they wouldnâ(TM)t let you build or sell anything. and btw with an army of lawyers, companies get sued and lose all the time. For the vaccine Pfizer had to get something out asap. Clearly they did not bother with due diligence.
Pledge with your fingers crossed (Score:5, Insightful)
This is hilarious. First they pledge not to enforce their patent over the pandemic. Now, since Pfizer is more preferred and made a killing, they say "oh we meant in smaller countries".
I love snake fights.
Re:I love snake fights. (Score:1, Flamebait)
I love snake fights.
I don't. One of the snakes might win.
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Anyway, Pfizer and BioNTech had to know this was coming. They could have come to a licensing agreement long ago but chose not to, so now it goes to the courts. This seems reasonable.
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This is hilarious. First they pledge not to enforce their patent over the pandemic. Now, since Pfizer is more preferred and made a killing, they say "oh we meant in smaller countries".
I love snake fights.
Well a lot of people are saying the pandemic is over and COVID-19 is now endemic, it's not so much that things are good as they're not really getting any better.
Either way, I think this is one of the few times patents are really good. Moderna spent a bunch of years doing R&D with little to show for it until the pandemic happened, and then they made giant piles of money. And that's exactly how we want it because every dollar Moderna makes goes into the calculus of investors deciding whether to fund the n
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Either way, I think this is one of the few times patents are really good. Moderna spent a bunch of years doing R&D with little to show for it until the pandemic happened, and then they made giant piles of money. And that's exactly how we want it because every dollar Moderna makes goes into the calculus of investors deciding whether to fund the next batch of Modernas with a bunch of R&D but no clear money maker yet.
Though pledges "not to enforce" and lawsuits are a terrible way to run that system. In a pandemic the better approach would have been compulsory licensing to ensure the tech got used but the IP owners still got rewarded.
I'm going to have to disagree with you here. Once the vaccines were ready, we basically vaccinated the rich countries and relaxed our precautions.
People we begging to make factories to produce vaccines for the poorer countries, so they could get vaccinated too. We didn't allow it because of patents.
If we did a global vaccination campaign before relaxing our precautions, we would have had so much less chance for mutations and we would've stood a chance of wiping it out. We might not have gotten the current m
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Either way, I think this is one of the few times patents are really good. Moderna spent a bunch of years doing R&D with little to show for it until the pandemic happened, and then they made giant piles of money. And that's exactly how we want it because every dollar Moderna makes goes into the calculus of investors deciding whether to fund the next batch of Modernas with a bunch of R&D but no clear money maker yet.
Though pledges "not to enforce" and lawsuits are a terrible way to run that system. In a pandemic the better approach would have been compulsory licensing to ensure the tech got used but the IP owners still got rewarded.
I'm going to have to disagree with you here. Once the vaccines were ready, we basically vaccinated the rich countries and relaxed our precautions.
People we begging to make factories to produce vaccines for the poorer countries, so they could get vaccinated too. We didn't allow it because of patents.
There were probably some production bottlenecks, but we didn't do it not because of patents but because of lack of compulsory licensing.
The western govs should have set fair license fees and then paid those licenses themselves to for developing countries to produce their own vaccines.
IP owners still get compensated and the developing countries get the ability to manufacture their own vaccines.
The "we won't enforce the patents against developing countries" promise came as a result of western govs forcing the
Government Action Needed (Score:2)
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Indeed. They have made more than enough profits. This is just unfettered greed.
Which is why we don't need private corps (Score:3)
There are thousands of scientists in the USA who want to nothing other than work in a lab and discover stuff. Make all this government funded (insert usual disclaimer about current gov't completely corrupt) and save time, cost, and full sharing of all progress.
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LIke it would be so hard to change the gov't pay classes.
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The private sector can also more easily give big bonuses as incentives for discoveries etc. The gov't usually has to carefully codify the rules for bonuses to avoid squabbles, which will probably water down their usefulness. I've worked for both private and public. Incentives are not something the gov't has figured out how to manage well.
Novel (Score:2)
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Interesting. Do you have any links I could read?
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Interesting. Do you have any links I could read?
No, get with the program. These days, the folks spreading disinformation mostly provide YouTube links that you can *watch*. It's harder to debunk when fact checkers have to watch it over the course of an hour.
Does this matter? (Score:2)
IIRC, the US government was the customer for these vaccines. And they have the right to take and reassign production of any IP they acquire. Particularly if defense production rules were put into place at the time.
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LOLWUT? Buying a product entitles you to its IP and gives you permission to reassign it to another party?
You know the vaccine is supposed to be injected into a muscle and not rolled up into a joint and smoked right?
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Couldn’t even make it to the second sentence.
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Buying a product entitles you
Me? No. The US government? Yes.
Trump purchased the Covid vaccines [archives.gov] under the defense production act law on behalf of the US public.
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Maybe you linked to the wrong thing, but I saw nothing there that would mean that the German arm of Pfizer gave up the IP for the vaccine developed in Germany by mainly German scientists to the US just because there was a bulk order. One that was dwarfed by the rest of the world.
Re:Does this matter? (Score:5, Informative)
Apparently Project Warp Speed was not using the defense production act, Trump just as usually promised to do that but never did.
From the Wikipedia article on the Defense Production Act:
On December 8, 2020, more than a month after losing the 2020 presidential election, then-president Trump said that he would invoke the Defense Production Act to produce vaccine doses, but he did not do so before the end of his term.
Instead Project Warp Speed was funded by a different way:
Operation Warp Speed, initially funded with about $10 billion from the CARES Act (Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security) passed by the United States Congress on March 27, 2020, was an interagency program that includes components of the Department of Health and Human Services, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, and the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA); the Department of Defense; private firms; and other federal agencies, including the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Veterans Affairs.
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it's just business (Score:2)
Class-Action Corruption. (Score:2)
First, putting a vaccine behind patent legalities in the middle of a global pandemic, was downright evil. Like Hitler evil.
But to even allow these greedy fucks to fight it out in a patent battle? No. Wrong. Fuck you. Remove all government reimbursements and funding. Remove all tax benefits and waivers. Fuck both of these companies for even trying to do this, in the face of hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Hell, with repeat infections, the only thing these companies should be facing at this point is a
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Nonsense, the other companies have more than enough money to pay if they indeed are infringing. This has nothing to do with people getting vaccines.
It's provable the vaccines did a lot of good and saved lives.
You seem to have misconceptions about what a vaccinecan do. No vaccine provides one hundred percent protection from infection or severe disease. Take any vaccine you can imagine and look up the real stats, for example smallpox vaccine is effective in about 95 of people.
If used public funding, they shouldn't have patent (Score:2)
If they used ANY public funding I don't think any related patents should be public domain. It's ridiculous that they use government grants for this stuff, then lock it down behind patents and things.
Ironic considering the recent article above this on opening up research papers.