Moderna says it has no plans to share its COVID-19 vaccine formula but will scale up production

ROME (AP) — Moderna has no plans to share the recipe for its COVID-19 vaccine because executives have concluded that scaling up the company’s own production is the best way to increase the global supply, the company’s chairman said Monday.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Noubar Afeyan also reiterated a pledge Moderna made a year ago not to enforce patent infringement on anyone else making a coronavirus vaccine during the pandemic.

“We didn’t have to do that,” Afeyan said. ”We think that was the right, responsible thing to do.” He added: “We want that to be helping the world.”

The United Nations health agency has pressed Moderna to share its vaccine formula. Afeyan said the company analyzed whether it would be better to share the messenger RNA technology and determined that it could expand production and deliver billions of additional doses in 2022. ...

Asked how successful he thought others might be if they started from scratch using Moderna patents, he declined to speculate. But “it’s hard for me to imagine that they would be able to get any meaningful scale in a short time frame at the quality we would be able to do as a certainty” for 2022.

Asked about recent criticism that Moderna has been furnishing its vaccine mainly to wealthy countries while low-income countries clamor for the product, Afeyan said the company supplied a “quite significant” output to poorer nations, mostly through its work with the U.S. government, which contracted early in the pandemic with the company for doses.

Moderna is working with multiple governments “to help them secure supplies for the express purpose of supplying to low-income countries,″ the executive said. ...