it's possible there's something i'm missing or mistaken about, but that seems like a really stupid thing to do.
Like the manufacturing side of rna vaccines seems like a good thing for a country to be able to have the technical capacity and manufacturing capability to utilize. how that can happens say the malaria one works out, countries in africa being able to make it sounds nice. that goes into the speculative category probs (and more of a long term argument about health care?)
moderna has already said they weren't going to enforce their ip protection on their vaccine and that is at least partly because just freeing up that legal obstacle doesn't enable some other company to figure out how to manufacture the vaccine, which is apparently a very complex process.
but the question isn't should anyone but moderna and pfizer manufacture rna vaccines. of course they should. the question is why should the us govt void their ip protections rather than allow/incentivize moderna and pfizer to license others to produce their vaccines.
s.
it's worth mentioning here that the money we're talking about here is incredibly small compared to the economic impact of coronavirus. an incredibly optimistic estimate of how many rna vaccine doses could be produced by non moderna/pfizer facilities over the next year or so would be like 4 billion doses. pfizer sells vaccines to the us govt for $20, so the ip value per dose is almost certainly less than $10/dose. 40 billion dollars compared to the like 6 or 7 trillion the us has spent to ameliorate the effects of covid just in the united states. it's nothing.