Lauren Dempsey, MS in Biomedicine and Law, RN, FISM News 

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Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna are keeping a tight seal on their COVID-19 vaccine patents, refusing to share them with any other companies seeking to develop next-generation vaccines.

Last month, experts and leaders from multiple pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies met at the White House Summit on the Future of COVID-19 Vaccines. The agenda was to discuss advancing vaccine equity and how to strengthen the United States’ response to COVID-19 and future pandemics.

Dr. Alondra Nelson leads the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and is Deputy Assistant to President Biden. She spoke at the summit about what she called the critical need for next-generation vaccines that will provide broad protection with the ability to “thwart pandemic pathogens, and save lives around the world.”

These next-generation vaccines will include “innovations like nasal sprays and skin patches, instead of needles, to administer vaccines in a more comfortable and accessible way so that everyone in America and around the world can readily benefit from them.”

However, there are many hurdles to producing, manufacturing, and distributing these vaccines, including funding — especially for smaller pharmaceutical and biotech companies with limited resources — and getting permission to research the current vaccines. In order for researchers to use the current mRNA vaccines for studies, they would need permission from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, which hold patents on the technology.

Unsurprisingly, Pfizer-BioNTech isn’t willing to share their vaccines for research purposes, according to a company spokesperson.

Yale professor Dr. Akiko Iwasaki described the difficulty that her team faced in trying to further their research on an intranasal vaccine.

“In order for us to develop a better vaccine, we need a comparator. For that reason, everyone who’s doing research in this area is in the same boat, we don’t have access to do a comparison.”

While it may seem unethical or even unfair to prevent competing pharmaceutical companies from access to the vaccine, especially during a pandemic, Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna have billions of dollars in profits to consider, as well as the future of their own next-generation vaccines, which both companies are currently developing.

Both Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna may also have other reasons for preventing third-party research of their COVID shots. While studies initially showed high rates of efficacy, according to the companies, further research and time have shown that the mRNA shots have poor durability, severely waning long-term protection, and a long list of side effects, including potentially serious and even fatal reactions. In particular, a recent report showed that 56% of children 2 years and younger had a “systemic reaction” to the shot.

Moderna did not respond to STAT with a comment, however, a Pfizer-BioNTech spokesperson said its own “extensive studies” of the vaccine were ongoing and information from those studies would be shared when it becomes available.