moderna covid vaccine - Bill of Health

BETHESDA, MD - JUNE 29, 2019: NIH NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH sign emblem seal on gateway center entrance building at NIH campus. The NIH is the US's medical research agency.

Will NIH Learn from Myriad when Settling Its mRNA Inventorship Dispute with Moderna?

January 6, 2022January 6, 2022 Jorge Contreras 7 Comments

By Jorge L. Contreras

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is currently embroiled in a dispute over the ownership of patent rights to Moderna’s flagship mRNA COVID-19 vaccine (mRNA-1273).

The NIH, which funded much of Moderna’s research on the COVID-19 vaccine, should be assertive in exerting control over the results of this taxpayer-funded research. Failing to do so would be a missed opportunity for the public sector to have a say in the distribution and pricing of this critical medical technology.

Promote Trust, Avoid Fraud: Lessons in Public Health Messaging from the Booster Roll Out

November 30, 2021November 30, 2021 Carmel Shachar Leave a comment

By Carmel Shachar

Even in September 2021, it was fairly clear that boosters for all adults, regardless of risk factors or which vaccines they initially received, would be coming soon.

Indeed, within two months, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) revised its recommendations to say that all vaccinated adults should receive a COVID-19 booster.

Unfortunately, the discrepancy between past messaging, which restricted access to boosters to select groups, and the current, broad recommendation has spawned two, related public health communications problems.

Causes of COVID Vaccine Hesitancy

November 30, 2021November 30, 2021 The Petrie-Flom Center Staff 1 Comment

By Jasper L. Tran

Vaccinated individuals — like Tolstoy’s happy families — are all alike; each unvaccinated individual is hesitant for her own reason.

Prior research conducted in developed countries reveals five main individual-level determinants of pre-COVID vaccine hesitancy (commonly referred to as the 5 C model drivers of vaccine hesitancy): (1) Confidence (trust in vaccine’s effectiveness and safety, vaccine administrators and their motives); (2) Complacency (perceiving infection risks as low and vaccination as unnecessary); (3) Convenience / Constraints (structural or psychological barriers to converting vaccination intentions into vaccine uptake); (4) Risk Calculation (perceiving higher risks related to vaccination than the infection itself); and (5) Collective Responsibility (willingness to vaccinate to protect others through herd immunity).

COVID-19 vaccines see these five hesitancy determinants again, only further exacerbated by waves of misinformation promulgated on social media, including through “bot” accounts, that prey on the concerns and insecurities of an already vulnerable public.

On the one hand, irrational and unreasonable conspiracy theories about COVID-19 and its vaccine abound among the anti-vaxxers — a subgroup of science deniers. These conspiracy theories include:

Bill of Health - Globe and vaccine, covid vaccine

Decolonizing the Pandemic Treaty Through Vaccine Equity

October 29, 2021October 29, 2021 The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Tlaleng Mofokeng, Daniel Wainstock, and Renzo Guinto

In recent years, there have been growing calls to “decolonize” the field of global health. Global health traces its roots back to colonial medicine when old empires sought to address tropical diseases which, if not controlled, could be brought by colonizers back home.

Today, many countries in the Global South may have already been liberated from their colonizers, but the colonial behavior of global health continues to manifest in policies, funding, research, and operations.

Unlike the tropical diseases of the past, SARS-CoV-2 has affected rich and poor countries alike, but the tools for putting this pandemic under control — most notably vaccines — remain unevenly distributed across the world. As of October 27, 2021, 63.5% of individuals in high-income countries have been vaccinated with at least one shot of the COVID-19 vaccine. Meanwhile, in low-income countries, only 4.8% of the population has been vaccinated with at least one dose.

The Pandemic Treaty and Intellectual Property Sharing: Making Vaccine Knowledge a Public Good

October 15, 2021October 14, 2021 The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Ellen ‘t Hoen

The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the lack of regulation for the sharing of intellectual property (IP) and technology needed for an effective and equitable response to the crisis.

The Pandemic Treaty (or other legal instrument) scheduled for discussion at the World Health Assembly in the fall of 2021 should focus on establishing the norm that the IP and knowledge needed to develop and produce essential pandemic health technologies become global public goods. It should also ensure predictable and sufficient financing for the development of such public goods.

Promoting Vaccine Equity

October 13, 2021October 20, 2021 The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Ana Santos Rutschman

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought into sharp relief longstanding equity problems surrounding the allocation of newly developed vaccines against emerging pathogens.

In my upcoming book, Vaccines as Technology: Innovation, Barriers, and the Public Health, I examine these problems and look into possible solutions to incrementally build more equitable frameworks of access to vaccines targeting emerging pathogens. These solutions focus on ensuring that vaccines are made available affordably to the populations that need them the most according to public health parameters.

Should Vaccinating Children Off-Label Against COVID-19 Be Universally Prohibited?

October 6, 2021October 6, 2021 The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Govind Persad, Patricia J. Zettler, and Holly Fernandez Lynch

As children are experiencing the highest rates of COVID-19 in many states, can efforts to universally preclude vaccination of those under 12 until the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) specifically authorizes use in that age group be justified?

In a case commentary published today in Pediatrics, we argue that the answer is no.

This view diverges from the positions of the American Association of Pediatrics, FDA, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In fact, the CDC, which controls the nation’s supply of COVID-19 vaccines, has taken steps to currently ban the practice of vaccinating youth under the age of 12.

We acknowledge that recommendations to widely vaccinate 5-11 year olds should await FDA and CDC guidance (which is expected soon, given upcoming advisory committee meetings). But, especially at the lower dose offered in pediatric clinical trials, we think that off-label pediatric administration of approved COVID-19 vaccines, like Pfizer’s Comirnaty mRNA vaccine, should be treated like other off-label uses and left to the individual risk-benefit judgments of doctors and patients (or here, parents).

What’s the Law on Vaccine Exemptions? A Religious Liberty Expert Explains

September 16, 2021September 16, 2021 The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

By Douglas Laycock, University of Virginia

For Americans wary of COVID-19 vaccine mandates, like the sweeping requirements President Joe Biden announced Sept. 9, 2021, it seems there are plenty of leaders offering ways to get exemptions – especially religious ones.

No major organized religious group has officially discouraged the vaccine, and many, like the Catholic Church, have explicitly encouraged them. Yet pastors from New York to California have offered letters to help their parishioners – or sometimes anyone who asks – avoid the shots.

These developments point to deep confusion over how to win a religious exemption. So what are they, and is the government even required to offer the exemptions in the first place?

Preventing Misuse of COVID-19 Vaccine Medical Exemptions

August 23, 2021August 20, 2021 Ross D. Silverman 10 Comments

By Ross D. Silverman and Gabriel T. Bosslet

As COVID-19 vaccination mandates become increasingly common, we can expect exemption requests (and misuse) to become increasingly widespread, too.

Most entities requiring vaccination mandates or proof of vaccination upon entry may offer limited grounds upon which an individual may request an exemption, usually based upon religious beliefs or medical reasons. Recent history with childhood immunization programs shows less rigorously-structured and -enforced vaccination exemption policies are vulnerable to increased usage, relative to narrower or more stringently-monitored programs. That history also shows there is a possibility some health care licensees may be willing to support individuals seeking to circumvent COVID-19-related requirements through offering questionable medical exemptions.

Entities imposing COVID-19 vaccination mandates, and state health care licensure boards, can take several simple but significant steps to counter misuse of medical exemptions and better protect communities from COVID-19. These safeguards also can decrease the temptation for licensed health professionals to recklessly undermine critical, lawful, evidence-driven public health efforts.

Access-to-Medicines Activists Demand Health Justice During COVID-19 Pandemic

August 12, 2021August 11, 2021 The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Brook K. Baker

It was apparent from the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic that a business-as-usual approach — perpetuating the biopharmaceutical industry’s intellectual property-based monopolies and allowing artificial supply scarcity and nationalistic hoarding by rich countries — would result in systemic failure and gross inequity.

The world had seen it all before, from the Big Pharma blockade of affordable antiretrovirals to treat HIV/AIDS, to the hoarding of vaccines by the global north during the H1N1 bird flu outbreak in 2009 and its stockpiling of Tamiflu.

Activists in the access-to-medicines movement quickly mobilized to combat the threat of vaccine/therapeutic apartheid.

Tag: moderna covid vaccine