Moderna sues Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna is suing fellow vaccine developers Pfizer and German partner BioNTech for infringing on patents related to mRNA technology used in their COVID-19 vaccine, the company announced Friday.
Moderna sues Pfizer-BioNTech, The Cambridge, Massachusetts, company claims Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine, Comirnaty, infringes on patents it filed between 2010 and 2016, according to a Moderna news release. We believe that Pfizer and BioNTech unlawfully copied Moderna’s inventions, and they have continued to use them without permission,” said Moderna chief legal officer Shannon Thyme Klinger. Moderna alleges Pfizer and BioNtech copied two key features of the company’s patented technologies, which they say are “critical to the success of mRNA vaccines.” Pfizer spokeswoman Jerica Pitts said the companies were “surprised by the litigation” and plan to “vigorously defend against the allegations of the lawsuit.” Their COVID-19 vaccine, she said, was based on BioNTech’s proprietary mRNA technology. Pfizer’s COVID-19 pill, Paxlovid, appears to provide little or no benefit for certain adults, while still reducing the risk of hospitalization and death for high-risk seniors, according to a large study published Wednesday.
Moderna sues Pfizer-BioNTech, The results from a 109,000-patient Israeli study are likely to renew questions about the U.S. government’s use of Paxlovid, which has become the go-to treatment for COVID-19 due to its at-home convenience. The Biden administration has spent more than $10 billion purchasing the drug and making it available at thousands of pharmacies through its test-and-treat initiative. The researchers found that Paxlovid reduced hospitalizations among people 65 and older by roughly 75% when given shortly after infection. But people between the ages of 40 and 65 saw no measurable benefit, according to the analysis of medical records. A spokesman for Pfizer declined to comment on the results, which were published in the New England Journal of Medicine. While Dr. Anthony Fauci, who became both a reassuring and politically polarizing voice during the pandemic, is retiring from public service in December, he’s still got a lot to share. In a wide-ranging interview with USA TODAY, President Joe Biden’s chief medical advisor and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease says the world might be opening up again, but that doesn’t mean the pandemic is behind us.
Moderna sues Pfizer-BioNTech, “I think that when you talk about new normal, you have to focus predominantly on COVID,” Fauci said. “We have the emergence of infectious diseases more often than people realize. Many of them are relatively insignificant at a global level.” Fauci has spent his career studying emerging viruses and guiding America’s response to health crises like the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and West Nile Virus. “Could we actually eradicate SARS COV-2, the cause of COVID? I can tell you categorically, the answer to that is going to be no,” says Fauci. “We’ve only eradicated from the face of the earth one significant pathogen and that’s smallpox.”
Source: This news is originally published by usatoday