U.S. government got $400 million in vaccine royalties from Moderna, company says

Pharmaceutical company Moderna indicated this week that it had sent the U.S. government a "catch-up" payment of $400 million in connection with a patent dispute.

The company concluded an agreement with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in December of last year, establishing "a nonexclusive patent license agreement" allowing the company to use disputed technologies in its production of the COVID-19 vaccine, the Epoch Times reported.

In addition to the $400 million payment to NIAID, Moderna will "pay low single-digit royalties on future net sales of our COVID-19 vaccines," according to Moderna CFO Jamey Mock.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH), NIAID's parent organization, had contended that Moderna wrongly omitted government researchers from a patent filing involving one of the vaccine's key sequences.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, in 2021, identified the sequence as a key component in successful vaccines, saying "[t]he work of [government researchers] Dr. Barney Graham and Kizzmekia Corbett and others stabilized the prefusion spike protein which is used in virtually all, with few exceptions, of the vaccines that are now successful," the Times noted.

A government official previously told the outlet that an NIH review had determined that the researchers had co-invented the sequence.

Ben Whedon is an editor and reporter for Just the News. Follow him on Twitter.