Former chief judge of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims Susan Braden said the federal government’s “statement of interest” in a Moderna lawsuit may present a “misuse of the law.” The statement comes as U.S. Attorney David Weiss invoked a rarely-used law from the early 1900s to state the federal government should take on liability for potential patent infringement in Moderna’s development of the COVID-19 vaccine.
“I’m a former federal judge,” Braden said. “People don’t generally just pop up in the middle of a lawsuit unless they want to move to intervene, or they have something at stake in the case that would make them be a party.” She added, “That’s not a good way of running a railroad. And I think it’s a misuse of the law.”
From Fox News:
"The reason it's problematic is because the government didn't tell Moderna, ‘We need a vaccine to look this way,’" Gregory Dolin, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and law professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law, told Fox News Digital. "The government told Moderna, 'We need a vaccine however you come along with it whether it's a mRNA vaccine or traditional vaccine.'" "If they did infringe the patent, if there is a licensing fee or royalty fee to be paid, it makes no sense for it to be paid by the taxpayers when Moderna gets to reap all the benefits," Dolin continued. "It seems odd that U.S. taxpayers would essentially immunize Moderna of every single dose of the drug they produced irrespective of where it was shipped."
