$13M Payday for Moderna CEO Shows Cause to Abandon Vaccine Patents, Says AHF

AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) today is citing the recent $13 million payday announced for Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel as just cause for a renewed and stepped-up global call to abandon all patents on vaccines. According to Fierce Pharma, Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel collected a salary of $950,000, a $1.9 million bonus, and stock options worth $9 million in 2020 on top of a $58.6 million haul from the company’s IPO in 2018 and $8.9 million in overall compensation in 2019.

“Awarding eight-figure compensation and stock packages to drug company executives like Stéphane Bancel as the COVID-19 pandemic rages on, particularly around the globe, shows just how warped and calloused the pharmaceutical industry is,” said AHF President Michael Weinstein. “This vaccine was created with taxpayer funding involved. The urgency of the global pandemic coupled with such over-the-top compensation for drug company execs underscores the need to abandon all patents for vaccines.”

Moderna received taxpayer support via initial research funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Moderna then reportedly received over $1.4 billion from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (BARDA) last year to produce 100 million doses of its COVID-19 vaccine.

In October, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Moderna declared that it would not enforce its patent rights for its COVID-19 vaccine candidate during the pandemic if it received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) (read Moderna statement). The FDA granted emergency approval for its vaccine on December 18, 2020.

However, according to an op-ed on drug pricing published in the New York Times last week, executives at Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson have said they will maintain their current pricing models during the pandemic but expect to raise prices after it ends and plan to return to more “commercial” pricing as early as later this year.

AHF is calling on Moderna and all other drug companies receiving taxpayer funds and taxpayer-funded research to make the COVID 19 vaccine available to the international community by withholding enforcement of their patents in order to make this lifesaving medicine available to rich and poor countries equally. At least 30 countries have not yet injected a single person, according to the New York Times.

AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF), the largest global AIDS organization, currently provides medical care and/or services to over 1.5 million people in 45 countries worldwide in the U.S., Africa, Latin America/Caribbean, the Asia/Pacific Region and Eastern Europe. To learn more about AHF, please visit our website: www.aidshealth.org, find us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/aidshealth and follow us on Twitter: @aidshealthcare and Instagram: @aidshealthcare.

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