Conflicting Interests
The South Korean government recently asked the Joe Biden administration to allow access to COVID-19 vaccine-related intellectual property rights so that South Korean companies can produce the vaccines.
At present, Korean manufacturers are planning to invest billions of dollars in order to produce one billion COVID-19 vaccines a year. They already signed contracts with AstraZeneca, Novavax, and so on and Samsung Biologics is slated to produce the Moderna vaccine starting from this week.
However, U.S. vaccine developers are not allowing their access to related intellectual property rights. “South Korean pharmaceutical companies have failed to access the mRNA technology of U.S. developers because of conflicting interests,” the Financial Times reported, adding, “Pfizer, Moderna and so on are not going to share the rights in that smooth ingredient supply is not easy and teaching how to produce COVID-19 vaccines is costly and time-consuming.” The Financial Times also pointed out that the possibility of technology theft by China is another reason they are refusing to do so.
On the other hand, the Joe Biden administration has supported technology sharing between vaccine manufacturers and the WTO measure not to protect COVID-19 vaccine-related patent rights. In addition, it has emphasized that less expensive plant networks outside the United States can increase the global COVID-19 vaccine supply by billions of doses a year.