<
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20211218/00522848140/us-govt-paid-moderna-to-develop-vaccine-moderna-wants-to-keep-patent-all-to-itself.shtml>
"Folks may know that when Jonas Salk created the polio vaccine he chose
not to patent it, and when asked who owns the patent on it, responded:
"Well... the people I would say. There is no patent... Could you patent
the sun?"
Whenever people bring this up, patent maximalists — especially those in
the pharma world — like to come up with all sorts of excuses about how
that was "different" somehow. My favorite excuse was that he did this
because "the public had funded the vaccine."
Fast forward to today. Moderna, somewhat famously, helped produce one of
the very first COVID vaccines using its mRNA technology. It's a great
thing (I got two Moderna shots in my own arm as soon as I could). You
may have heard a lot about Moderna as well. While the company had been
around for a decade, this vaccine is its first product on the actual
market. It had been experimenting with mRNA technology, but hadn't
actually come out with anything until the COVID vaccine.
But — and this is the important part — it was the US government, and
by that we mean "the US public," who mostly funded Moderna's COVID
vaccine... and it was actually US government employees who did a lot of
the important work. At the beginning of the pandemic, the US government
gave Moderna $483 million dollars to work on the COVID vaccine. A few
months later it gave another $472 million."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
