Moderna accepted $2.5 billion in taxpayer money to develop its Covid-19 vaccine. But as the world faces a dire vaccine shortage, U.S. and overseas officials are having trouble persuading the company to license its technology.

A meeting of the World Trade Organization’s intellectual property council ended Thursday without action on a proposal to suspend patent rights on COVID-19 vaccines. The United Kingdom and some wealthy European Union nations, led by Germany, continue to oppose a patent waiver, which was first proposed over a year ago by India and South Africa and backed by over 100 WTO member nations. Since then, the world has recorded over 3.8 million COVID-19 deaths.

Rich nations’ refusal to take on the pharmaceutical industry could “prolong the pandemic indefinitely”

J&J rang up $502 million in sales from its COVID-19 vaccine in the third quarter after pulling in $264 million during the first half of 2021.

Global vaccination has been highly regressive. The extremely poor are also extremely poorly vaccinated. The huge inequality we currently observe is an inequity that may eventually backfire epidemiologically, socially and economically. The regressive pattern of vaccination enhances the risk of the development of more dangerous variants and by doing that it risks exacerbating the direct and indirect effects of the health emergency on social and economic outcomes either through domestic or cross-border channels.

[Image description: Three screenshots. The first is a passage from a news article which reads “On April 12, 1955, Edward R. Murrow asked Jonas Salk who owned the patent to the polio vaccine. ‘Well, the people, I would say,’ Salk responded. ‘There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?’ By the time of his chat with Murrow, which aired on the day the polio vaccine was announced as safe and 90 percent effective, Salk was already more messiah than virologist to the average American. Polio paralyzed between 13,000 and 20,000 children annually in the last pre-vaccine years, and Salk was the face of the inoculation initiative. Appearing on television to present the vaccine as a gift to the American people was a public relations masterstroke.”

The second is a headline from a news article which reads “Pfizer raises sales forecast for Covid vaccine by almost a third to $33bn. US drugmaker expects to deliver 2.1bn doses of the coronavirus shot in 2021. Pfizer reported a 92% rise in second-quarter sales thanks to the success of the vaccine.”

The third is a tweet posted by The Guardian (@guardian) on July 29th, 2021, which reads “AstraZeneca sales of Covid vaccine triple to #1.2bn in first half of 2021” -end ID]