BARDA Acting Chief Gary Disbrow said the goal was to negotiate the best price for the US government, adding that “we would probably have to pay a slightly higher price” for vaccines made by pharmaceutical companies that had not received government funds.
The bottom: According to the intellectual property advocacy group Knowledge Ecology International, seven government grants of hundreds of millions of dollars for Covid-19 treatments reduce or eliminate repetitive language designed to allow the government to exercise authority over prices and production.
The organization obtained portions of BARDA and Pentagon contracts with vaccine manufacturers through Freedom of Information Act requests it released this week. The agreements are heavily drafted, but they change or remove some of the language given to the government by those authorities under the Bayh-Dole Act.
A spokesman for the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, which oversees BARDA, said the confidential and private information had been removed from documents shared with KEI.
“It is important to note that when the federal government pays for all development and manufacturing of a product, the federal government owns the doses of the manufactured product with tax dollars,” the spokesperson said.
Whats Next: The Modern vaccine candidate developed in association with NIH is slated to begin phase III trials this month, which means it may be the first to be marketed with positive results.
Several other candidates, including the Pfizer injection and the CanSino Biologics option developed with the Chinese government, have received no funding from the United States.
