ROME (AP) — The chairman of Moderna says the company has no plans to share the recipe for its COVID-19 vaccine because executives have concluded that scaling up their own production is the best way to increase the global supply.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Noubar Afeyan also reiterated a pledge Moderna made a year ago not to enforce patent infringement on anyone else making a coronavirus vaccine during the pandemic.
“We didn’t have to do that,” Afeyan told the AP. ”We think that was the right, responsible thing to do.” He added: “We want that to be helping the world.”
The United Nations health agency has pressed Moderna to share its vaccine formula.
Afeyan said the company analyzed whether it would be better to share the messenger RNA technology and determined that it could expand production and deliver billions of additional doses in 2022.
Afeyan added that they spent $2.5 billion and 10 years developing the platform that makes Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine.
“Others joined the hunt when COVID-19 came along, and we’re glad to see that the capacity, therefore, has been increased considerably beyond what Moderna would have been able to do by itself," Afeyan told the AP.