A healthcare worker fills a syringe with the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. At the Giorgio Companies site in Blandon, PA where the CATE Mobile Vaccination Unit was on site to deliver Moderna COVID-19 vaccines to workers on Wednesday morning April 14, 2021.
Ben Hasty | MediaNews Group | Getty Images
Covid vaccine maker stocks fluctuated Thursday after the Biden government announced it would support a motion before the World Trade Organization to waive patent protection for the mRNA technology used to fire the shots.
Pfizer was down as much as 5% on Thursday from Wednesday’s close of trading, while Moderna fell nearly 12% before both stocks made up for most of those losses. The companies use the same mRNA technology to make their recordings. Pfizer, which makes its Covid-19 vaccine with French pharmaceutical company BioNTech, closed about 1% that day, while Moderna lost about 1.4% that day.
South Africa and India are urging US officials and the WTO to temporarily forego patent protection so that developing countries can manufacture the life-saving vaccines until world leaders can bring the pandemic under control. Human rights organizations like Doctors Without Borders, Oxfam and Amnesty International have all signed a letter in support of the proposal.
U.S. Sales Representative Katherine Tai wrote a statement Wednesday evening supporting the change.
“This is a global health crisis and the extraordinary circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic call for extraordinary measures,” she said. “The government firmly believes that protecting intellectual property, but in the service of ending this pandemic, supports the removal of this protection for COVID-19 vaccines.”
Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel told investors on a earnings call Thursday that he had “not lost a minute of sleep” on the news and said traders’ concerns were false.
Last year, Biden made an election promise to “absolutely positively” renounce vaccination patents, the implementation of which could take some time.
Critics of the move say that developing countries do not have the infrastructure to produce the vaccines, others disagree.
Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca both use an adenovirus, a common type of virus that typically causes mild cold symptoms, to make their Covid vaccines. The stocks of these two companies barely changed on Thursday.
The waiver of patent protection can take months or even years. Analysts largely shook off the news.
“We believe a new manufacturing operation can take 6 to 9 months to scale up, effectively limiting the impact of other manufacturers. While we expect the headlines to put pressure on MRNA, we don’t see any significant practical impact from this news,” said the Morgan Stanley analysts said in a research report Thursday.
Other Bank of America analysts note that “US support does not mean approval when WTO decisions require consensus, and other members such as the EU, UK, Japan and Switzerland are currently opposed to intellectual property surrenders.” from.”
Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke out against the exemptions together with these countries on Thursday. The President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, did not accept the plan and said in a speech that she was “ready to discuss proposals for effective and pragmatic management of the crisis”.
“The limiting factor in the manufacture of vaccines is the production capacity and high quality standards, not the patents,” a Merkel spokeswoman said in a statement.
Bank of America analysts also cited “barriers to vaccine development, including sourcing raw materials, developing manufacturing and engineering know-how.”
Both Pfizer and Moderna already have plans to produce billions of cans in the meantime, leaving essentially all competitors far behind in the manufacturing process.
