New research shows the European Union, the United States and the U.K. have received more COVID vaccines in the past six weeks than the entire continent of Africa, of African countries, has received over the past year. The research was conducted by the People’s Vaccine Alliance.
This comes as the world is confronting a surge in new cases linked to the highly contagious Omicron variant. Public health advocates have long warned the world will continue to face new and potentially more dangerous variants if major parts of the world remain largely unvaccinated.
And in Moderna’s case, Moderna as a company really would not exist absent the support from the U.S. government. First, Moderna received $2.5 billion in U.S. taxpayer funds for research and development for its vaccine recipe. And, as you noted, Moderna scientists co-created the vaccine along with U.S. government scientists from the National Institutes of Health. However, when Moderna filed its patent applications, it deliberately excluded those U.S. government scientists. And, what’s more, it did not fully reveal that for a year it was engaged in an active dispute with the U.S. government over who actually created the vaccine. It buried that information from investors, like Oxfam.
And so we filed a complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the SEC, saying that Moderna was not fully transparent about its dispute with the U.S. government. And this really goes to the heart of vaccine access, because if the U.S. government did in fact co-create the
— source democracynow.org | Dec 23, 2021