Moderna’s Pledge Not to Enforce Patents on Their Covid-19 Vaccine Is Worthless
1–10 of 19 posts
Re: Moderna’s Pledge Not to Enforce Patents on Their Covid-19 Vaccine Is Worthless
#2Garbage take.
No one with even half a clue thought that Moderna pledging not to enforce patents meant that they would just give away their IP.
And what’s missing in this unhinged rant is any nuance about how to allow for generic drugs whilst still ensuring pharmaceutical companies can afford to invest in increasingly expensive bets.
Re: Moderna’s Pledge Not to Enforce Patents on Their Covid-19 Vaccine Is Worthless
#3Garbage take. No one with even half a clue thought that Moderna pledging not to enforce patents meant that they would just give away their IP. And what’s missing in this unhinged rant is any nuance about how to allow for generic drugs whilst still ensuring pharmaceutical companies can afford to invest in increasingly expensive bets.
Not that I agree, because I don't, but I think the Jacobin position would be that government banks would bankroll the pharmaceutical co-ops who would freely share the process once it worked.
Re: Moderna’s Pledge Not to Enforce Patents on Their Covid-19 Vaccine Is Worthless
#4Your half baked blog post is worthless.
Re: Moderna’s Pledge Not to Enforce Patents on Their Covid-19 Vaccine Is Worthless
#5Garbage take. No one with even half a clue thought that Moderna pledging not to enforce patents meant that they would just give away their IP. And what’s missing in this unhinged rant is any nuance about how to allow for generic drugs whilst still ensuring pharmaceutical companies can afford to invest in increasingly expensive bets.
It's Jacobin Magazine. Putting complicated news stories into a procrustean oversimplification that produces a socialism/capitalism manichean duality is a substantial part of their reporting.
I suggest not taking it too seriously;it's just what they do.
Re: Moderna’s Pledge Not to Enforce Patents on Their Covid-19 Vaccine Is Worthless
#6No, it's not.
The article argues that patents are irrelevant, since the know-how of drug manufacturing is the only thing that really matters. This would definitely be news to the drug companies, who spend fortunes depending their patents. And yes, of course know-how matters, but forgoing patent litigation removes at least one obstacle for competitors and it's a charitable thing for Moderna to do.
In this particular instance, I'm perfectly fine with Moderna making a fortune off of their vaccines. The prices they are charging (~$35/dose) are simply not astronomical, especially compared to the damage of this pandemic. But the issue right now is that even with all the money in the world, there's only so much capacity to manufacture these drugs. To get a vaccine off the ground you need to:
1) Have the expertise to develop it in the first place (probably the easy part)
2) Test the vaccine to rigorous standards (costs a fortune)
3) Have the manufacturing facilities to make the drug
4) Have the people to run said facilities
5) Source all the ingredients that go into the vaccine as well as containers to hold it and the refrigerators to store and transport it (good luck)
This article would have you believe that the Moderna leadership are filthy capitalists and if it weren't for them the vaccines would be widely available, but money simply isn't the issue here... it's a worldwide shortage of materials and talent, as well as government regulations that make it incredibly hard to bring a drug to market (but not unjustified... as we see, it's very important to have public confidence in the safety of a vaccine).
Re: Moderna’s Pledge Not to Enforce Patents on Their Covid-19 Vaccine Is Worthless
#7Garbage take. No one with even half a clue thought that Moderna pledging not to enforce patents meant that they would just give away their IP. And what’s missing in this unhinged rant is any nuance about how to allow for generic drugs whilst still ensuring pharmaceutical companies can afford to invest in increasingly expensive bets.
Not that I agree, because I don't, but I think the Jacobin position would be that government banks would bankroll the pharmaceutical co-ops who would freely share the process once it worked.
But then we get nationalism and politics permanently intertwined with medicine.
As we’ve seen with the US and EU during COVID are exports and recipe sharing going to be banned if some cancer curing drug is discovered ?
Re: Moderna’s Pledge Not to Enforce Patents on Their Covid-19 Vaccine Is Worthless
#8Your half baked blog post is worthless.
It's a popular-ish American socialist magazine. Not someone's personal blog.
Re: Moderna’s Pledge Not to Enforce Patents on Their Covid-19 Vaccine Is Worthless
#9Despite the title this blog post seems to be more about the unfortunate trade that "the commons" did with private inventors: originally patents were meant as an alternative to trade secrets - you revealed the trade secret to the public, and in exchange you got 20 years of exclusive use of said (no-longer-)secret.
But now we've got the worts of both worlds: companies patent an essential part of their process to gain exclusivity and prevent others from reinventing the process, and also keep trade secrets for most of the rest of the process, so that the patent itself is 99% useless - you'll still need to reinvent the process, except you're only allowed to do that 20 years later.
Re: Moderna’s Pledge Not to Enforce Patents on Their Covid-19 Vaccine Is Worthless
#10Jacobin, all they have is a hammer, and everything looks like a sickle.