“In the Covid-19 pandemic, world leaders have allowed pharmaceutical companies to place extraordinary profits ahead of saving lives,” lamented one campaigner As Moderna reported higher-than-expected revenue driven entirely by sales of its publicly funded Covid-19 vaccine, health equity campaigners on Wednesday renewed calls for pharmaceutical companies to waive patent protections in order to share their lifesaving […]
“We take on the risk. They take away the profits,” said one vaccine equity advocate. The Massachusetts-based pharmaceutical giant Moderna disclosed in a financial filing this week that it received another $300 million in U.S. government funding for coronavirus vaccine development in March even as the company hoarded its technology from the world—and attempted to undermine a critical […]
“To push for the termination of this lifesaving project in order to protect the interests of pharmaceutical companies is shameful,” said one advocate. Documents published Wednesday by a prominent medical journal reveal that a foundation representing the German company BioNTech—Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine partner—has been working behind the scenes to undercut African scientists’ burgeoning effort to produce an mRNA-based […]
Excluding federal scientists as co-inventors “could have important public health consequences,” warned one expert. Moderna came under fire Tuesday in response to New York Times reporting about an ongoing dispute with a federal agency over whether government scientists should be credited as co-inventors of a key component of the U.S. company’s Covid-19 vaccine. Dr. Céline Gounder, an infectious diseases […]