6 ms·

Moderna waiving Intellectual Property rights for the remainder of the pandemic (2020)

379 points by squidofbits 5y ago

ignoramous 5y ago
The image here https://archive.is/Le9gr https://archive.is/Le9gr captures the patent divide, with Anglo-sphere and the West all-in for free markets, whilst Asia and Africa want the patents to be buried for the greater good. As the crisis worsens in poorer countries, despite an unprecedented 20+ vaccines in deployment, it feels like a sick joke to see White dudes on my Twitter timeline post about "my pfizer versus your moderna".
- thefounder 5y ago
  >>White dudes Since when did this become a race thing?
  - nerdponx 5y ago
    It became a race thing when the USA and European powers used race as an explicit justification for the (attempted) rape and enslavement of pretty much the rest of the world.
    - thefounder 5y ago
      Do you know that Europe is a continent with many countries?
      - nerdponx 5y ago
        Yes, and many of them were involved. Would it make the downvoters less upset if I wrote "Western European" instead?
  - ignoramous 5y ago
    I didn't mean it in the way you put it, tbh. I meant to highlight the position of privilege the West is in. I just stated what I feel like when I see those tweets, compounded by the reports of the richer countries hoarding vaccines. Canada has procured 8 vaccines per person? Similar figures for the US, the UK, Germany and elsewhere.
    - nerdponx 5y ago
      You seem to have struck a nerve with this one. I really hate the term "white fragility", but when I see posts like this heavily downvoted and flagged I can't think of a better explanation.
      - ignoramous 5y ago
        I know. The behaviour here also kind of explains why you couldn't trust White dudes to follow-up on their promise of diversity in tech, either. It is hard to face uncomfortable PoVs when it is easy to silence them from a position of privilege, which you and I know is going to be abused every single time. Kind of makes me sad. On twitter, when I pointed out to a White tech bro that they were endorsing [and donating to] an Indian right-wing militant org, they simply shrugged it off as hard to understand [what's right] from afar. I mean, the org was knee-deep in anti-Muslim riots in the Capital just a year ago. The tweet and the endorsement still stands on their timeline like a slap in the face when the bro's own personal blog says they're all-in for "empathy and diversity". From my PoV, I take it that they refused to be "corrected" by a non-White dude, and that their fragile ego is hurt.
capableweb 5y ago
> Beyond Moderna’s vaccine, there are other COVID-19 vaccines in development that may use Moderna-patented technologies. We feel a special obligation under the current circumstances to use our resources to bring this pandemic to an end as quickly as possible. Accordingly, while the pandemic continues, Moderna will not enforce our COVID-19 related patents against those making vaccines intended to combat the pandemic. Further, to eliminate any perceived IP barriers to vaccine development during the pandemic period, upon request we are also willing to license our intellectual property for COVID-19 vaccines to others for the post pandemic period. This is great! Moderna shows the world that you can be innovative and charitable while still running a for-profit business.
- joosters 5y ago
  upon request we are also willing to license our intellectual property for COVID-19 vaccines to others How is that different from what they would be doing normally? Companies generally like to license their IP, it brings in lots of cash for little (extra) effort. Note that they don't claim to be offering reduced license fees in this part of their statement!
  - Kalium 5y ago
    Companies like Moderna that are currently using IP are not always willing to license it. Sometimes they prefer to keep it in-house and reserved for their own use.
    - ethbr0 5y ago
      Especially given not all of the world has a tradition of caring about foreign IP enforcement. Say, post-pandemic and when you'd like to use Moderna's methods for other drugs. Which, say what you want about IP law, but pharma objectively has the best claim to it -- if we want new drugs and safety, exclusivity periods and sole ownership of IP are the only way to balance the massive initial financial outlay. (Without funding it directly from government)
    - bluGill 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
phonon 5y ago
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/04/moderna-patents-covid-19-vaccine https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/04/moderna-patents-covid-19-... "Moderna’s Pledge Not to Enforce the Patents on Their COVID-19 Vaccine Is Worthless" tldr...all the good stuff are trade secrets.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  That article> This “invulnerable exclusivity” is harmless enough when it protects secret soda formulas and hamburger mystery sauces. It’s less cute when it blocks countries from using their legal right to manufacture and import lifesaving medicines. This is introduced as if random countries have an established legal (rather than moral) right to manufacture these items covered by patent. I wasn’t able to find (in the article or my brain) the basis for the claim that there’s an established legal right to do so.
  - opencl 5y ago
    The entire point of the article is that even when patents are expired (or temporarily waived in the case of the Moderna vaccine), the inventions in them still cannot be manufactured by others because the patent does not contain anywhere close to all of the required information. There is certainly a legal right to manufacture things that are not currently under patent.
  - zinok 5y ago
    Surely random countries have legal rights to do most things they want to, since they make up their own jurisdictions?
    - icegreentea2 5y ago
      Yes, you can have a legal right to manufacture it - which is to say the legal right to try without being sued or breaking a law. That's not the same thing as the legal right to manufacture it successfully, which is what the distinction would be. The article is blurring the right to attempt to manufacture without legal restriction, and the ability to successfully replicate the formulation. This blurring makes sense from some points of view (especially from Jacobin's POV, and from an argument of immediate justice for the most people), but obviously falls apart from other POVs.
cycomanic 5y ago
That's quite big (and great) news. Many people have been arguing that this should be done so that labs in e.g. India could legally produce the vaccine in particular for countries outside the rich western countries. This is also much in the interest of the rich western countries, because quicker immunization worldwide reduces the risk of new mutations. Let's see if the others will follow.
- aeonflux 5y ago
  October 8, 2020
  - cycomanic 5y ago
    Yes I had not heard about it before, I guess we see if there will be any actual effects of this.
- sumedh 5y ago
  India is already producing the AstraZeneca vaccine.
Ecco 5y ago
Since this was posted 6 month ago, has any company taken advantage of this by now?
- magnio 5y ago
  Knowing the formula for the vaccine is one thing, being able to manufacture it at large scale is another (that surely require industrial secrets). This article has some more details: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/02/02/myths-of-vaccine-manufacturing https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/02/02/my...
  - cies 5y ago
    Developing a manufacturing process for the remainder of the pandemic, after which continuing may make one susceptible to lawsuits is just not a great outlook.
nextstep 5y ago
From last year. Unclear when they will declare the pandemic over.
pietroppeter 5y ago
October 8, 2020
johnchristopher 5y ago
So, layman question: will it increase moderna's vaccine availability? Or is it about something else entirely?
- drran 5y ago
  Moderna will sue violators of their patents when they lost their primary income source.
- meepmorp 5y ago
  This is from last year, and the answer is no. The supply constraints are unrelated to IP, and always have been.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
high_derivative 5y ago
My understanding used to be that this will not change much on an immediate basis since the nano-particle delivery system + its manufacturing chain are quite complicated and not easily scalable. Does anyone know if this is not the case?
- meepmorp 5y ago
  Yeah, that's what I've read. Basically, even if you could make the necessary mRNA particles properly, the it's useless without the delivery mechanism. Only a few companies even produce the necessary lipid products needed to deliver the vaccine, and they (and their suppliers) are already doing everything they can. The IP concerns had basically zero effect on the availability of vaccines.
- pas 5y ago
  For anyone interested: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/02/02/myths-of-vaccine-manufacturing https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/02/02/my... Around the time of this post I tried to get a bit more information on this, and ... well, here's the rabbit hole: - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68p3qAm4i7U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68p3qAm4i7U Use lithography to create the mold, then cure it, then put it into a pure O2 enivornment, then drop it on a glass plate and you just plasma glued the silicone and the glass. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYuyRUjnTgc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYuyRUjnTgc - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjyM8sNplm4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjyM8sNplm4 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTmgqFCIbsA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTmgqFCIbsA I still have no idea where the bottleneck actually is. Derek Lowe claimed that the manufacturers of the microfluidics devices are. Which is likely, because hacking together something in/for a lab is very different than getting it ready for "FDA GMP [good manufacturing practices] approval" ... but at the same time there are thousands of people dying every day, and I'd like to see the extraordinary evidence to support the extraordinary claim that it's "impossible" to scale up vaccine manufacturing. (Impossible here meaning that it's impossible to get to the same necessary purity and control.)
  - rossdavidh 5y ago
    What is possible given sufficient time, is very different from what is possible in a few months. Even in non-medical situations, getting a high-tech manufacturing process up and running takes years, not months, normally, and working long hours doesn't help as much as you think because the rate of mistakes goes up. But, having more capacity in a year's time, doesn't necessarily save any lives, since the mRNA vaccines are not the best fit for most of the world anyway, as they require two doses per person and are more demanding in the refrigeration requirements. The adenovirus vaccines, despite the one-in-a-quarter-million side affects, are much more likely to be usable in quantity in most of the world. So, you could get more capacity up in a year's time, when it won't be needed in the rich world and won't be useful in the rest of the world. My guess is Moderna just made this announcement to try to dispel the idea that their patent enforcement was somehow getting people killed.
FriedrichN 5y ago
I know making a vaccine is a little different than making strawberry jam, but why is there so little supply of the Moderna vaccine given this situation?
- 10x-dev 5y ago
  I see a lot of Moderna vaccine appointments in MA. Maybe they don't have the scale like Pfizer and most of their supply is staying in MA?
  - umanwizard 5y ago
    Nope, I got Moderna weeks ago on Staten Island, NYC.
- CubsFan1060 5y ago
  Seems like it it very common in the Mountain West region. Especially at the start, it seemed like far more Moderna than Pfizer. Now it seems about equal.
- anonu 5y ago
  Is there so little supply? I thought there was a glut of vaccines in the US. I just got my second dose of Moderna yesterday (in the US South), and there was nobody at the vaccine center.
  - FriedrichN 5y ago
    I should perhaps noted that I was speaking from an EU perspective. The US seems to be doing great, I wish I could say that we are as well.
- _fizz_buzz_ 5y ago
  Not OP, just to clarify for US folks: Here in the EU Moderna is only small part of the vaccination effort. The breakdown so far is roughly 70% Pfizer/Biontech, 20% AstraZenca and 10% Moderna. The Moderna deliveries are supposed to increase in Q3, however I am not sure how relevant it will be at that point. The EU also finalized a deal for 1.8 billion Pfizer/Biontech shots for the next couple years. So Moderna will probably also not be super relevant here going forward.
vohvae 5y ago
This looks like a good gesture from Moderna, but I do not think it will be of much help for most the developing world since the low temperatures needed for the storage of the vaccine are not feasible for the distribution infrastructure of these countries.
- maxerickson 5y ago
  Use on delivery should at least be workable in more populated areas. The shippers work for short term storage ( I expect that's why my county had a delivery of Pfizer early and not another since).
Clewza313 5y ago
A critical view of this pledge, separately posted on HN: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/04/moderna-patents-covid-19-vaccine https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/04/moderna-patents-covid-19-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26941571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26941571 TL;DR: Patents these days are effectively worthless at reproducing the invention, they only function as a legal way to stop competitors.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  On the up side, the patented technique, including even the "withheld" parts, ought to be worthless by the time it expires, anyway. We need legislation to eliminate withholding essential parts of what is patented.
  - tony0x02 5y ago
    > We need legislation to eliminate withholding essential parts of what is patented. That is the purpose of 35 usc 112 1st paragraph.
tmslnz 5y ago
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/21/world/vaccine-patents-us-eu.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/21/world/vaccine-patents-us-... Apparently it’s not as simple as temporarily waiving IP claims. On the one hand they don’t even own some of the rights being waived, and on the other hand they would need to do more than just waiving rights to truly support their stated goal of accelerating immunisation against COVID-19. This leaves, for me, a weird taste of a PR exercise more than a true commitment to the message they sent out.
- behnamoh 5y ago
  What more do you expect from them? The bottleneck - as other comments mentioned - is the supply chain.
  - tmslnz 5y ago
    I’d expect them to give something closer to the equivalent of a recipe than just a “list of ingredients”, as other comments have highlighted too in this thread. If you ask me how to bake a cake and I just tell you “butter, eggs and cumin” that’s not quite the same as also giving you the timings, measurements, cooking temp, etc.
jMyles 5y ago
Wonderful step. An even better one is to immediately release the raw data from the ongoing RCT, as a substantial chorus of scientists has asked, and to which Peter Doshi has given articulate voice in BMJ: https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/01/04/peter-doshi-pfizer-and-modernas-95-effective-vaccines-we-need-more-details-and-the-raw-data/ https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/01/04/peter-doshi-pfizer-and-...

379 points by squidofbits 5y ago

The image here https://archive.is/Le9gr https://archive.is/Le9gr captures the patent divide, with Anglo-sphere and the West all-in for free markets, whilst Asia and Africa want the patents to be buried for the greater good. As the crisis worsens in poorer countries, despite an unprecedented 20+ vaccines in deployment, it feels like a sick joke to see White dudes on my Twitter timeline post about "my pfizer versus your moderna".

thefounder 5y ago
>>White dudes Since when did this become a race thing?
- nerdponx 5y ago
  It became a race thing when the USA and European powers used race as an explicit justification for the (attempted) rape and enslavement of pretty much the rest of the world.
  - thefounder 5y ago
    Do you know that Europe is a continent with many countries?
    - nerdponx 5y ago
      Yes, and many of them were involved. Would it make the downvoters less upset if I wrote "Western European" instead?
- ignoramous 5y ago
  I didn't mean it in the way you put it, tbh. I meant to highlight the position of privilege the West is in. I just stated what I feel like when I see those tweets, compounded by the reports of the richer countries hoarding vaccines. Canada has procured 8 vaccines per person? Similar figures for the US, the UK, Germany and elsewhere.
  - nerdponx 5y ago
    You seem to have struck a nerve with this one. I really hate the term "white fragility", but when I see posts like this heavily downvoted and flagged I can't think of a better explanation.
    - ignoramous 5y ago
      I know. The behaviour here also kind of explains why you couldn't trust White dudes to follow-up on their promise of diversity in tech, either. It is hard to face uncomfortable PoVs when it is easy to silence them from a position of privilege, which you and I know is going to be abused every single time. Kind of makes me sad. On twitter, when I pointed out to a White tech bro that they were endorsing [and donating to] an Indian right-wing militant org, they simply shrugged it off as hard to understand [what's right] from afar. I mean, the org was knee-deep in anti-Muslim riots in the Capital just a year ago. The tweet and the endorsement still stands on their timeline like a slap in the face when the bro's own personal blog says they're all-in for "empathy and diversity". From my PoV, I take it that they refused to be "corrected" by a non-White dude, and that their fragile ego is hurt.

capableweb 5y ago

> Beyond Moderna’s vaccine, there are other COVID-19 vaccines in development that may use Moderna-patented technologies. We feel a special obligation under the current circumstances to use our resources to bring this pandemic to an end as quickly as possible. Accordingly, while the pandemic continues, Moderna will not enforce our COVID-19 related patents against those making vaccines intended to combat the pandemic. Further, to eliminate any perceived IP barriers to vaccine development during the pandemic period, upon request we are also willing to license our intellectual property for COVID-19 vaccines to others for the post pandemic period. This is great! Moderna shows the world that you can be innovative and charitable while still running a for-profit business.

joosters 5y ago
upon request we are also willing to license our intellectual property for COVID-19 vaccines to others How is that different from what they would be doing normally? Companies generally like to license their IP, it brings in lots of cash for little (extra) effort. Note that they don't claim to be offering reduced license fees in this part of their statement!
- Kalium 5y ago
  Companies like Moderna that are currently using IP are not always willing to license it. Sometimes they prefer to keep it in-house and reserved for their own use.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    Especially given not all of the world has a tradition of caring about foreign IP enforcement. Say, post-pandemic and when you'd like to use Moderna's methods for other drugs. Which, say what you want about IP law, but pharma objectively has the best claim to it -- if we want new drugs and safety, exclusivity periods and sole ownership of IP are the only way to balance the massive initial financial outlay. (Without funding it directly from government)
  - bluGill 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

phonon 5y ago

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/04/moderna-patents-covid-19-vaccine https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/04/moderna-patents-covid-19-... "Moderna’s Pledge Not to Enforce the Patents on Their COVID-19 Vaccine Is Worthless" tldr...all the good stuff are trade secrets.

sokoloff 5y ago
That article> This “invulnerable exclusivity” is harmless enough when it protects secret soda formulas and hamburger mystery sauces. It’s less cute when it blocks countries from using their legal right to manufacture and import lifesaving medicines. This is introduced as if random countries have an established legal (rather than moral) right to manufacture these items covered by patent. I wasn’t able to find (in the article or my brain) the basis for the claim that there’s an established legal right to do so.
- opencl 5y ago
  The entire point of the article is that even when patents are expired (or temporarily waived in the case of the Moderna vaccine), the inventions in them still cannot be manufactured by others because the patent does not contain anywhere close to all of the required information. There is certainly a legal right to manufacture things that are not currently under patent.
- zinok 5y ago
  Surely random countries have legal rights to do most things they want to, since they make up their own jurisdictions?
  - icegreentea2 5y ago
    Yes, you can have a legal right to manufacture it - which is to say the legal right to try without being sued or breaking a law. That's not the same thing as the legal right to manufacture it successfully, which is what the distinction would be. The article is blurring the right to attempt to manufacture without legal restriction, and the ability to successfully replicate the formulation. This blurring makes sense from some points of view (especially from Jacobin's POV, and from an argument of immediate justice for the most people), but obviously falls apart from other POVs.

cycomanic 5y ago

That's quite big (and great) news. Many people have been arguing that this should be done so that labs in e.g. India could legally produce the vaccine in particular for countries outside the rich western countries. This is also much in the interest of the rich western countries, because quicker immunization worldwide reduces the risk of new mutations. Let's see if the others will follow.

aeonflux 5y ago
October 8, 2020
- cycomanic 5y ago
  Yes I had not heard about it before, I guess we see if there will be any actual effects of this.
sumedh 5y ago
India is already producing the AstraZeneca vaccine.

Ecco 5y ago

Since this was posted 6 month ago, has any company taken advantage of this by now?

magnio 5y ago
Knowing the formula for the vaccine is one thing, being able to manufacture it at large scale is another (that surely require industrial secrets). This article has some more details: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/02/02/myths-of-vaccine-manufacturing https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/02/02/my...
- cies 5y ago
  Developing a manufacturing process for the remainder of the pandemic, after which continuing may make one susceptible to lawsuits is just not a great outlook.

nextstep 5y ago

From last year. Unclear when they will declare the pandemic over.

pietroppeter 5y ago

October 8, 2020

johnchristopher 5y ago

So, layman question: will it increase moderna's vaccine availability? Or is it about something else entirely?

drran 5y ago
Moderna will sue violators of their patents when they lost their primary income source.
meepmorp 5y ago
This is from last year, and the answer is no. The supply constraints are unrelated to IP, and always have been.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

high_derivative 5y ago

My understanding used to be that this will not change much on an immediate basis since the nano-particle delivery system + its manufacturing chain are quite complicated and not easily scalable. Does anyone know if this is not the case?

meepmorp 5y ago
Yeah, that's what I've read. Basically, even if you could make the necessary mRNA particles properly, the it's useless without the delivery mechanism. Only a few companies even produce the necessary lipid products needed to deliver the vaccine, and they (and their suppliers) are already doing everything they can. The IP concerns had basically zero effect on the availability of vaccines.
pas 5y ago
For anyone interested: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/02/02/myths-of-vaccine-manufacturing https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/02/02/my... Around the time of this post I tried to get a bit more information on this, and ... well, here's the rabbit hole: - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68p3qAm4i7U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68p3qAm4i7U Use lithography to create the mold, then cure it, then put it into a pure O2 enivornment, then drop it on a glass plate and you just plasma glued the silicone and the glass. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYuyRUjnTgc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYuyRUjnTgc - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjyM8sNplm4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjyM8sNplm4 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTmgqFCIbsA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTmgqFCIbsA I still have no idea where the bottleneck actually is. Derek Lowe claimed that the manufacturers of the microfluidics devices are. Which is likely, because hacking together something in/for a lab is very different than getting it ready for "FDA GMP [good manufacturing practices] approval" ... but at the same time there are thousands of people dying every day, and I'd like to see the extraordinary evidence to support the extraordinary claim that it's "impossible" to scale up vaccine manufacturing. (Impossible here meaning that it's impossible to get to the same necessary purity and control.)
- rossdavidh 5y ago
  What is possible given sufficient time, is very different from what is possible in a few months. Even in non-medical situations, getting a high-tech manufacturing process up and running takes years, not months, normally, and working long hours doesn't help as much as you think because the rate of mistakes goes up. But, having more capacity in a year's time, doesn't necessarily save any lives, since the mRNA vaccines are not the best fit for most of the world anyway, as they require two doses per person and are more demanding in the refrigeration requirements. The adenovirus vaccines, despite the one-in-a-quarter-million side affects, are much more likely to be usable in quantity in most of the world. So, you could get more capacity up in a year's time, when it won't be needed in the rich world and won't be useful in the rest of the world. My guess is Moderna just made this announcement to try to dispel the idea that their patent enforcement was somehow getting people killed.

FriedrichN 5y ago

I know making a vaccine is a little different than making strawberry jam, but why is there so little supply of the Moderna vaccine given this situation?

10x-dev 5y ago
I see a lot of Moderna vaccine appointments in MA. Maybe they don't have the scale like Pfizer and most of their supply is staying in MA?
- umanwizard 5y ago
  Nope, I got Moderna weeks ago on Staten Island, NYC.
CubsFan1060 5y ago
Seems like it it very common in the Mountain West region. Especially at the start, it seemed like far more Moderna than Pfizer. Now it seems about equal.
anonu 5y ago
Is there so little supply? I thought there was a glut of vaccines in the US. I just got my second dose of Moderna yesterday (in the US South), and there was nobody at the vaccine center.
- FriedrichN 5y ago
  I should perhaps noted that I was speaking from an EU perspective. The US seems to be doing great, I wish I could say that we are as well.
_fizz_buzz_ 5y ago
Not OP, just to clarify for US folks: Here in the EU Moderna is only small part of the vaccination effort. The breakdown so far is roughly 70% Pfizer/Biontech, 20% AstraZenca and 10% Moderna. The Moderna deliveries are supposed to increase in Q3, however I am not sure how relevant it will be at that point. The EU also finalized a deal for 1.8 billion Pfizer/Biontech shots for the next couple years. So Moderna will probably also not be super relevant here going forward.

vohvae 5y ago

This looks like a good gesture from Moderna, but I do not think it will be of much help for most the developing world since the low temperatures needed for the storage of the vaccine are not feasible for the distribution infrastructure of these countries.

maxerickson 5y ago
Use on delivery should at least be workable in more populated areas. The shippers work for short term storage ( I expect that's why my county had a delivery of Pfizer early and not another since).

Clewza313 5y ago

A critical view of this pledge, separately posted on HN: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/04/moderna-patents-covid-19-vaccine https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/04/moderna-patents-covid-19-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26941571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26941571 TL;DR: Patents these days are effectively worthless at reproducing the invention, they only function as a legal way to stop competitors.

ncmncm 5y ago
On the up side, the patented technique, including even the "withheld" parts, ought to be worthless by the time it expires, anyway. We need legislation to eliminate withholding essential parts of what is patented.
- tony0x02 5y ago
  > We need legislation to eliminate withholding essential parts of what is patented. That is the purpose of 35 usc 112 1st paragraph.

tmslnz 5y ago

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/21/world/vaccine-patents-us-eu.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/21/world/vaccine-patents-us-... Apparently it’s not as simple as temporarily waiving IP claims. On the one hand they don’t even own some of the rights being waived, and on the other hand they would need to do more than just waiving rights to truly support their stated goal of accelerating immunisation against COVID-19. This leaves, for me, a weird taste of a PR exercise more than a true commitment to the message they sent out.

behnamoh 5y ago
What more do you expect from them? The bottleneck - as other comments mentioned - is the supply chain.
- tmslnz 5y ago
  I’d expect them to give something closer to the equivalent of a recipe than just a “list of ingredients”, as other comments have highlighted too in this thread. If you ask me how to bake a cake and I just tell you “butter, eggs and cumin” that’s not quite the same as also giving you the timings, measurements, cooking temp, etc.

jMyles 5y ago

Wonderful step. An even better one is to immediately release the raw data from the ongoing RCT, as a substantial chorus of scientists has asked, and to which Peter Doshi has given articulate voice in BMJ: https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/01/04/peter-doshi-pfizer-and-modernas-95-effective-vaccines-we-need-more-details-and-the-raw-data/ https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/01/04/peter-doshi-pfizer-and-...