In 2021, the WHO and partners worked with Afrigen in South Africa to build local mRNA vaccine production capacity. The project exposed a gap between publishing a vaccine’s sequence and transferring the process needed to manufacture it reliably.
I thought Moderna should share more know-how during the pandemic. A promise not to enforce patents was useful, but a factory still needed formulations, equipment settings, quality controls, and trained people. The point was not that any manufacturer could safely copy a vaccine from a recipe. It was that public-health access depends on practical technology transfer, not only legal permission.