Corona scandal: Moderna wants to sue Pfizer and BionNTech for stealing vaccine technology

The coronavirus epidemic has slowed down, and there is a temporary lull on the medical front. Pharmaceutical companies decided to take advantage of the respite and open up a legal front. Moderna sued Pfizer and BionNTech over coronavirus vaccines. Moderna accuses competitors of stealing technology and violating patents.

If you do not go into details of medical terms and legal chicanery, then the essence of the claims is as follows. Moderna claims that Pfizer/BioNTech copied mRNA technology without permission, which Moderna patented between 2010 and 2016. Long before the emergence of COVID-19 in 2019 and its rapid spread around the world in early 2020.

The speed with which a COVID-19 vaccine has been developed is entirely due to mRNA technology, which “teaches” human cells to make copies of the spike protein and mount an immune response when confronted with a real virus in the future. Thanks to mRNA, what used to take years now takes months.

According to representatives of Moderna, Pfizer and BioNTech, they conducted clinical trials of 4 different candidate vaccines, among which there were variants without the above technology. But in the end, the pharmaceutical companies decided to continue developing a vaccine with the exact same mRNA chemical modification as the Moderna vaccine.

In the end, the Pfizer vaccine was approved first, and the Moderna vaccine only a week later. Now Moderna wants to get its due for lost profits, while Pfizer and BionNTech intend to defend themselves to the last. Against the background of the lawsuit, the shares of these companies have already fallen by 1.4% and 2%.