Joe Biden Is Dragging His Feet on Sharing Vaccine Information With the World
The White House has ways it could share vaccine information with other countries — but it refuses to threaten Moderna’s profits.
The Joe Biden administration is unwilling to share vaccine information that might interfere with corporate profits, even in the face of a global crisis. (Gage Skidmore / Flickr)
Hopes were high back in June, when the World Health Organization (WHO) helped establish an mRNA vaccine technology transfer hub in South Africa. The first of its kind in the region, the hub was meant to scale up production of the COVID-19 vaccine — specifically the Moderna vaccine — by sharing production information and technology with manufacturers in the region, which is the least vaccinated in the world.
Five months later, the transfer hub is still unable to access vaccine technology, since neither Pfizer-BioNtech nor Moderna have shared their intellectual property. Negotiations on the matter have stalled. In the meantime, Omicron, a new strain of COVID-19, was first identified in the country, where just 15 percent of people were vaccinated as of last month. Omicron is now spreading internationally and has been labeled a “variant of concern” by the WHO over its high transmissibility and potential virulence, prompting widespread travel bans and fears of renewed lockdowns.
The Joe Biden administration could have resolved the delay months ago by sharing vaccine technology with the WHO. Experts say the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has long possessed Moderna’s vaccine recipe, including step-by-step instructions for how to make it and exact ingredient amounts, since government scientists from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) coinvented it.
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