9 October 2020 - - US-based nonprofit AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) called the recent announcement that Cambridge, Massachusetts-based biotechnology company Moderna (NASDAQ: MRNA) has declared that it will not enforce its patent rights for its COVID-19 vaccine candidate during the pandemic if it gets approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) a "positive development."
Moderna reportedly received over $1.4 billion from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (BARDA) to produce 100 million doses of its COVID-19 vaccine.
AHF also calls on Moderna and all other drug companies receiving taxpayer funds and taxpayer-funded research to make the COVID-19 vaccine available to the international community by withholding enforcement of their patents in order to make this lifesaving medicine available to rich and poor countries equally.
In a related action, the advocacy group Public Citizen said in a press statement that Moderna should "... dedicate its technology to the World Health Organization (WHO) so that the world can prepare to make vaccines for billions of people, rather than permit vaccine apartheid where only wealthy countries have vaccine access."
AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF), the largest global AIDS organization, currently provides medical care and/or services to over 1.4m people in 45 countries worldwide in the US, Africa, Latin America/Caribbean, the Asia/Pacific Region and Eastern Europe.