Top federal health officials said Thursday that they intend to begin offering low- and middle-income nations access to the technology developed by government scientists that might be used to prevent or treat COVID-19. They did not specify which technologies might be included but hinted that the policy could eventually apply to the Moderna vaccine if the Biden administration wins a patent dispute with the company.
President Joe Biden’s health secretary, Xavier Becerra, and his top medical adviser for the coronavirus, Dr. Anthony Fauci, made the comments to reporters after a meeting with health ministers from around the world. They come as Biden is preparing to convene his second global summit on COVID-19, expected in the coming weeks.
Fauci said the National Institutes of Health has already “offered to license several NIH-owned technologies” to the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 Technology Access Pool, known as C-TAP, which the WHO describes as a “global one-stop shop” for drug developers to share their intellectual property. The technologies would then be made available to the Medicines Patent Pool, a United Nations-backed public health organization that works to increase access to medicines in poor and middle-income nations.
Biden has been under intense pressure from activists and WHO officials to do more to press the pharmaceutical industry to share its technology with the world. The new policy, officials say, will enable poor nations to manufacture inexpensive vaccines and therapeutics that are developed in the United States.
But there is a big catch: Fauci would not be specific about which technologies would be licensed and could not say if Moderna’s powerful coronavirus vaccine — developed in partnership with NIH scientists — would be among them.
That is because the company and the government are locked in a bitter dispute over who deserves credit for inventing the central component of the vaccine, which grew out of a four-year collaboration between Moderna and the 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 disagreement, which has broad implications for the vaccine’s long-term distribution and billions of dollars in future profits.
Fauci said the negotiations are ongoing, but he and Becerra strongly suggested that if the government wins that dispute and gains ownership of the crucial patent, it would work to include the Moderna technology in its offerings.
“President Biden has made it very clear that he wishes to assert all his authorities to make sure that we use everything at our disposal” to make medicines available to those who need them, Becerra said, adding that “it should be no surprise” that “we’re going to push the envelope where the law allows us.”
Fauci said: “I just would repeat, in principle — and you can take from it what you will — that in principle we have offered to license NIH-owned technologies to the C-TAP for the purposes of the Medicines Patents Pool. So whatever it is that we can do, we will do.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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