Senior federal health officials said Thursday they intend to start offering low- and middle-income countries access to technologies developed by government scientists that could be used to prevent or treat Covid-19. They did not specify what technologies could be included, but hinted that the policy could eventually apply to Moderna’s vaccine if the Biden administration wins a patent dispute with the company.
President Biden Health Secretary Xavier Becerra and his chief medical adviser on the coronavirus, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, made the comments to reporters after meeting with health ministers from around the world. They come as Mr Biden prepares to convene his second global summit on Covid-19, expected sometime in the coming weeks.
Dr. Fauci said the National Institutes of Health had already “offered to license several technologies owned by NIH,” the World Health Organization’s Covid-19 technology access pool known as C-TAP, which the health organization describes as “global.” Stop Shop” for drug developers to share their intellectual property. The technologies will then be made available to the Medicines Patent Pool, a UN-backed public health organization that works to expand access to medicines in poor and middle-income countries.
Mr. Biden has been under intense pressure from WHO activists and officials to do more to get the pharmaceutical industry to share its technology with the world. The new policy will allow poor countries to produce low-cost vaccines and therapeutics developed in the United States, officials said.
But there’s a big catch: Dr. Fauci didn’t specify which technologies would be licensed, and he couldn’t say if Moderna, a powerful coronavirus vaccine developed in collaboration with NIH scientists, would be among them, he said.
This is because the company and the government are embroiled in a bitter dispute over who deserves the credit for inventing the vaccine’s central ingredient, which emerged from a four-year collaboration between Moderna and NIH, the government’s biomedical research agency. The NIH has been in talks with Moderna for more than a year to try to resolve the differences, which have serious implications for the vaccine’s long-term distribution and billions of dollars in future profits.
Dr. Fauci said negotiations were ongoing, but both he and Mr. Becerra strongly suggested that if the government won this dispute and obtained ownership of the all-important patent, they would work to include Moderna technology in their proposals. .
“President Biden has made it clear that he wants to use all his powers to make sure we use everything we have at our disposal” to make medicines available to those who need them,” Mr. Becerra said, adding that “this should not be surprising”. that “we are going to go beyond what is possible, if the law allows us.”
Dr. Fauci said, “I’ll just reiterate, in principle – and you can take whatever you want from this – that in principle we proposed to C-TAP to license NIH-owned technologies for the purposes of the Medicines Patent Pool. Therefore, whatever we can do, we will do.”