The very act of providing the product to the market place is a sufficient disclosure of "how to make the thing at all" for anyone with a modest level of skill i

The very act of providing the product to the market place is a sufficient disclosure of "how to make the thing at all" for anyone with a modest level of skill in this field. Moreover, there are plenty of detailed descriptions in Moderna's patent filings and other publicly available sources on how to make the thing at all. The issue is very much one of scale and I would wager that Moderna doesn't quite have the expertise either to reproduce their manufacturing pipeline at will. I have have personally witnessed a massive project failure in moving a therapeutic molecule from one manufacturing site to another, presumed identically equipped, manufacturing site. These things are not easy. It may be that this South African startup actually cannot use much of the information Moderna has on how to manufacture at scale because it only reproduces in Moderna's hands at Moderna's sites. This would be the expected outcome really.