Rome, Oct 12 (BUS) – The company’s chairman said Monday that Moderna has no plans to share the prescription for a COVID-19 vaccine because executives have concluded that increasing the company’s production is the best way to increase global supply.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Nubar Avian also reiterated a pledge made by Moderna a year ago not to impose patent infringement on anyone else making a coronavirus vaccine during the pandemic, the Associated Press reported.
“We didn’t have to do that,” Afian said. “We think this was the right and responsible thing to do.” “We want that world to help,” he added.
The United Nations health agency lobbied Moderna to share its vaccine formulation. Avian said the company analyzed whether it would be best to share messenger RNA technology, and decided it could expand production and deliver billions of additional doses in 2022.
“Within the next six to nine months, the most reliable way to produce high-quality, effective vaccines will be if we make them,” Avian said. When asked about the appeals from the World Health Organization and others, he said such appeals assume “we can’t get enough capacity, but in fact we know we can”.
Moderna “goed from zero production to one billion doses in less than a year,” Avian said, referring to a Massachusetts-based company to develop and mass-produce the vaccine. “And we think we’ll be able to go from 1 to 3 billion” in 2022.
“We believe we are doing everything we can to help with this pandemic,” Avian added, citing the company’s increased production and its patent infringement pledge.
He noted that $2.5 billion (about 2.1 billion euros) and 10 years were spent developing the platform that makes Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine.
“Others joined in the hunt when COVID-19 came along, and we are pleased to see that capacity has increased significantly beyond what our Moderna could have done” on its own, Avian said.
When asked how successful he thought others might be if they started from scratch using Moderna’s patents, he declined to speculate. But “it’s hard for me to imagine that they will be able to have any meaningful scale in a short time frame with the quality that we will be able to achieve with certainty” for 2022.
Asked about recent criticism that Moderna mainly supplies its vaccine to rich countries while demanding the product from low-income countries, Avian said the company has provided “very important” production to poor countries, mostly through its work with the US government, which has contracted Early in the pandemic with the company for potions.
The executive said Moderna is working with several governments “to help them secure supplies for the express purpose of supplying low-income countries”.
“There are more supplies in the EU and the US government than they can use,” said Avian, who is also a co-founder of Moderna.
Separately, Moderna last May committed to Covax, the UN-backed vaccine program, to arrange for a total of 500 million to go to poor countries. He said it is likely to start shipping 40 million doses in the last three months of this year, with the rest to be shipped next year.
The COVID-19 vaccine is our supplier’s only commercial product. The company last week announced plans to open a vaccine factory somewhere in Africa. Avian said he hopes a decision will be made soon in a specific location. However, it may take years for the plant to be operational.
Avian spoke on the last full day of a visit to Italy during which he met Pope Francis, who has called for a vaccine to be made universally available. He also appeared in Venice to promote a humanitarian award.
The Aurora Humanitarian Initiative, co-founded by Avian, aims to “empower modern-day saviors to bring life and hope” to those who urgently need basic humanitarian assistance. Through the award, the organization has provided $5 million in grants to more than 30 humanitarian projects to help people recover from war, famine, genocide, human rights abuses, and other challenges.
RAE