By Julie Steenhuysen
www.shorenewsnetwork.com
CHICAGO (Reuters) -U.S. National Institutes of Health scientists played “a major role” in developing Moderna Inc’s COVID-19 vaccine and the agency intends to defend its claim as co-owner of patents on the shot, NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins told Reuters on Wednesday.
In a story first reported by the New York Times on Tuesday, Moderna excluded three NIH scientists as co-inventors of a central patent for the company’s multibillion-dollar COVID-19 vaccine in its application filed in July.
Moderna expects 2021 sales of $15 billion to $18 billion from the COVID-19 vaccine – its first and only commercial product – and up to $22 billion next year.
In a statement emailed to Reuters, Moderna acknowledged that scientists at NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) played a “substantial role” in developing Moderna’s messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine, but the company said it disagrees with the agency’s patent claims.
Robert F. Kennedy's son claims that Dr. Tony Fauci and the Gates Foundation stand to make a hefty profit from the manufacture of the COVID-19 vaccine.
www.irishcentral.com
The Gates Foundation invests in Dr. Fauci's NIAID as part of its Decade of Vaccines program which aims to introduce a Global Vaccine Action Plan.
Kennedy Jr said that Dr. Fauci owns a patent for a specific type of vaccine that packages a virus in a protein sheet. The virus is then delivered to the human body through the vaccine and Kennedy Jr said that it very quickly reaches the organs necessary to give a person immunity to a certain illness.
He also said that the patent is currently being used by at least one of the major American vaccine manufacturers to make vaccines for coronavirus.
The four major vaccine manufacturers in the US are Pfizer, Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, and Sanofi, and if one of those four companies successfully develops a Coronavirus vaccine, Fauci and the NIAID stand to collect half of the royalties, according to Kennedy Jr.