The agricultural and pharmaceutical company Bavarian has that Corona vaccine manufacturer Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna sued over allegations of patent infringement on their mRNA vaccines. According to a Bayer spokesman, the company has filed a lawsuit in federal court in Delaware. According to the accusation, the manufacturers are said to have copied a technology that the Bayer subsidiary Monsanto had already applied for a patent in the 1980s.

Specifically, this is about a process for stabilizing the genetic material mRNA, which Monsanto originally used to develop more resilient crops. In addition, Bayer filed a similar lawsuit against the US company Johnson & Johnson in a federal court in New Jersey.

Bayer is not seeking a sales ban

Bayer is demanding undisclosed damages from the companies. However, Bayer said there is no intention to ban the sale of the vaccines. Bayer itself was not involved in the development of Covid vaccines and does not produce any. In recent years there have already been several disputes over patents relating to corona vaccines. So had, among other things Moderna filed a lawsuit against Pfizer in 2022.

Comirnaty achieved with their vaccine Pfizer and BioNTech will have global sales of 2024 more than 3.3 billion dollars. Moderna, on the other hand, earned $3.2 billion with Spikevax. However, this is only a fraction of sales at the height of the pandemic. Johnson & Johnson stopped selling its Covid vaccine in the USA in 2023.