VAX WARS: Moderna Sues Pfizer And BioNTech For Violating mRNA Patents To Create COVID Vaccines

This should be interesting…

On Friday, the New York Times posted an article, “Moderna Sues Pfizer and BioNTech Over Covid Vaccine.”

The report states that Moderna is claiming that Pfizer and BioNTech “copied its groundbreaking technology” and “infringed on patents” on mRNA technology that were filed between 2010 and 2016.

Moderna, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is suing its competitors Pfizer and BioNTech in U.S. District Court of Massachusetts and the Regional Court of Düsseldorf in Germany, where BioNTech is based.

Messenger RNA, or mRNA, is the genetic script that carries DNA instructions to each cell’s protein-making machinery and has been used in the production of coronavirus vaccines.

“We are filing these lawsuits to protect the innovative mRNA technology platform that we pioneered, invested billions of dollars in creating, and patented during the decade preceding the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Stéphane Bancel, Moderna’s chief executive. “This foundational platform, which we began building in 2010, along with our patented work on coronaviruses in 2015 and 2016, enabled us to produce a safe and highly effective Covid-19 vaccine in record time after the pandemic struck.”

Moderna, which accepted $2.5 billion in taxpayer money to develop its Covid-19 vaccine, had said in 2020 that it would not enforce its Covid-related patents while the pandemic continues. But in March, the company said it expected that manufacturers that are not based in or producing in low- or middle-income countries would respect the company’s intellectual property.
Source: New York Times

Moderna says that it’s not seeking damages for activities before March 8, nor is it trying to remove Pfizer and BioNTech’s vaccines from the market or asking for an injunction to prevent its future sale.

So, what are they suing for? For a chunk of the companies’ profits post-March 8, and (probably, more importantly,) to prevent future use of the patented mRNA technology in Pfizer and BioNTech pharmaceutical products.

After all, Pfizer has won the branding race when it comes to ‘Rona jabs, and as awful as their safety data is, it is still better than Moderna’s. Basically, they took the Moderna tech and (somewhat) improved it much to Moderna’s chagrin.

What makes this so interesting is that Moderna was locked in a rather contentious legal battle with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in November 2021 over… wait for it… who held the patent for Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine.

The NIH claims that Moderna failed to include three NIH scientists who played “a major role” in designing the genetic sequence used in Moderna’s vaccine from its patent application filed in July 2021. The NIH claims that they should be given co-ownership of the patent because three of their scientists played a key role in its development.

“I think Moderna has made a serious mistake here in not providing the kind of co-inventorship credit to people who played a major role in the development of the vaccine that they’re now making a fair amount of money off of,” said then-director of the NIH Dr. Francis Collins at the time.

An Axios report in June 2020 noted how unusual it was that the NIH had claimed joint ownership of the vaccine before it was even rolled out.

“The NIH mostly funds outside research, but it also often invents basic scientific technologies that are later licensed out and incorporated into drugs that are sold at massive profits. The agency rarely claims ownership stakes or pursues patent rights, but that appears to be different with this coronavirus vaccine,” reported Axios.

It also stated that the NIH and Moderna had been collaborating on coronaviruses prior to SARS-CoV-2.

A contract about mRNA technology being used in the development of a vaccine for MERS signed in December 2019 says that “mRNA coronavirus vaccine candidates [are] developed and jointly owned” by the two parties… but that was before the Wuhan “novel coronavirus” was genetically sequenced.

Here’s a screenshot of the relevant portion of the contract:

The NIH claims that its scientists created the “stabilized coronavirus spike proteins for the development of vaccines against coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2,” and the government consequently has “sought patents to preserve the government’s rights to these inventions.”

Interesting.

Back in 2017, a STAT News profile on Moderna noted some hurdles that the company was hitting in their “bold bid to revolutionize medicine” using mRNA technology.

While Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel told STAT News that “mRNA is like software: You can just turn the crank and get a lot of products going into development.”

STAT News reported that the biotech company was running into “troubling safety problems” with mRNA.

The article reports on Moderna’s goal of using mRNA to treat Crigler-Najjar syndrome — a rare disorder where patients suffering from it are missing a key liver enzyme needed to break down bilirubin, a yellowish substance that is created in the body when red blood cells are broken down. If it builds up in the body too much, it can lead to jaundice, muscle degeneration, and even brain damage.

Moderna was never able to develop a product safe enough to test on humans — they couldn’t hit the “scientific sweet spot” as STAT News describes it.

Every drug has what’s called a therapeutic window, the scientific sweet spot where a treatment is powerful enough to have an effect on a disease but not so strong as to put patients at too much risk. For mRNA, that has proved elusive.

In order to protect mRNA molecules from the body’s natural defenses, drug developers must wrap them in a protective casing. For Moderna, that meant putting its Crigler-Najjar therapy in nanoparticles made of lipids. And for its chemists, those nanoparticles created a daunting challenge: Dose too little, and you don’t get enough enzyme to affect the disease; dose too much, and the drug is too toxic for patients.

From the start, Moderna’s scientists knew that using mRNA to spur protein production would be a tough task, so they scoured the medical literature for diseases that might be treated with just small amounts of additional protein.

…Moderna could not make its therapy work, former employees and collaborators said. The safe dose was too weak, and repeat injections of a dose strong enough to be effective had troubling effects on the liver in animal studies.

Source: STAT News

The article also quotes one former Moderna manager saying, “It’s all vaccines right now, and vaccines are a loss-leader. Moderna right now is a multibillion-dollar vaccines company, and I don’t see how that holds up.”

It looks like vaccines aren’t a loss leader anymore.

The final paragraph in the piece is a quote by Bancel.

“I’m sure that five years from now we’ll look at 2017 as the inflection point that Moderna went for a liftoff,” he said at Monday’s presentation. “We have a chance to transform medicine, and we won’t quit until we are done and we have impacted patients.”

Indeed.

Moderna posted a profit of $18.5 billion in 2021, which was up significantly from $803 million in 2020.

Despite that, they’re fighting in court to hold onto their patents.

Doctors Without Borders blasted them around the same time as Moderna was being sued by the NIH for refusing to share their tech that was necessary to “save lives” in developing nations.

It’s so funny to see how the left, who used to rail against Big Pharma, have become shills for Big Pharma when these pharmaceutical companies haven’t changed one damned bit.

Dear Christian: Your Fear Is Full of Crap

by Doug Giles

Beginning in March 2020, many Christians went into lockdown-freak-out mode. Uncut, irrational, unbiblical, and not to mention, unconstitutional, fear gripped many churches and church leaders. Forced to choose between obeying the Word of God or the edict of man, most Western Churches buckled. We even saw it here in First Amendment-protected America.

The Apostle Peter buckled to fear on the night of Christ’s crucifixion. But he learned his lesson and lived the rest of his life bold as a lion. How can the church ‘go and do likewise’?

Read the book and find out!

Get your copy of Dear Christian: Your Fear Is Full of Crap now. Better yet, grab an extra copy for any petrified pastor who dutifully put obedience to the unconstitutional edicts of Mayor McCheese ahead of obedience to the explicit commandments of the LORD God Almighty.