Moderna refuses COVID vaccine to China over intellectual property rights

A deal between Moderna and China has fallen through, after the Massachusetts-based pharmaceutical company refused to hand over the intellectual property (IP) rights for its COVID-19 vaccine, the Financial Times reported.

Moderna, which has fiercely guarded its intellectual property around the world, denied Beijing’s request to hand over the recipe to develop its mRNA vaccine allegedly because of “commercial and safety concerns,” and also because of “possible reputation risks” if its partner in China failed to correctly manufacture the shot.

• The technology behind Moderna’s mRNA vaccine, along with the similar Pfizer-BioNTech shot co-developed by German and American pharmaceutical companies, provides more effective protection against the virus than the inactivated vaccines made by Chinese firms.
• The company had “given up” on previous efforts to enter the Chinese market because of Beijing’s demand to relinquish its technology, but the vaccine maker said it is still “eager” to sell the product to China.

Foreign COVID-19 vaccine makers are given two options by Beijing if they want to distribute in China: either hand over their full technology to a local drugmaker (as was the case with Moderna), or partner up with a local firm to create a manufacturing facility in the country, while still maintaining control of their underlying technology.

• Last year in May, China supported a proposal by the World Trade Organization to waive IP rights for COVID vaccines: Those in favor of the waiver typically claim that giving up those rights would help developing countries produce effective vaccines to fight the virus, while critics argued that patents were never the root cause preventing vaccine access and would de-incentivize private companies from developing the technologies.

But shrinking demand for COVID vaccines in wealthier countries likely drove Moderna’s willingness to reopen talks with China, which remains the last remaining major economy without a fully fledged mRNA shot despite its strict adherence to COVID zero — even as most countries around the world relax their pandemic rules: “We would certainly be very eager to collaborate with China if they felt that there was a need for a vaccine there,” Moderna’s chief medical officer, Paul Burton, said earlier this month.

• As of July, 92.1% of China’s population have received the first dose of various domestic COVID-19 vaccines, 89.7% are fully vaccinated, and 71.7% have been boosted.
• China currently has seven different COVID jabs available, five of which are inactivated vaccines. But several Chinese pharmaceutical companies, like Fosun Pharma and Walvax Biotechnology, are struggling to deal with the emergence of more infectious variants in their race to develop homegrown mRNA jabs.
• Indonesia, however, became the first country to grant emergency approval to Walvax’s mRNA COVID-19 vaccine this past weekend, despite the fact that the company has yet to publish results on how effective its jabs are against the virus and even before Beijing has given it the green light in its home country.