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TOKYO (Reuters) – Moderna Inc has held talks with the Chinese government over COVID-19 vaccines but a resolution has yet to be reached, CEO Stéphane Bancel told Reuters on Wednesday.
As the rest of the world lifts COVID restrictions, China continues to block large sectors of society and conduct mass testing to eliminate the coronavirus. It has not approved any foreign COVID vaccines and is based on several injections developed domestically.
“We are open, we have the capacity,” Bancel told Reuters on the sidelines of a news conference in Tokyo on supplying its mRNA-based vaccines to China, declining to say that Moderna had submitted its vaccine for approval there.
A Moderna spokesman said those discussions had taken a stand in the afterlife and that it could say whether those discussions were still ongoing.
There is about a 20 percent chance that a “problematic” variant of the virus will emerge this winter, Bancel said, adding that this is not his baseline scenario.
“We deserve to be humble about biology,” he said.
Bancel, speaking in Tokyo, Moderna plans to build services in Japan to produce mRNA-derived products.
Japan on Monday boosters of vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer Inc targeting the Omicron variant of the coronavirus.
Moderna sued Pfizer Inc and its spouse BioNTech SE last month for patent infringement in the progression of the first COVID vaccine in the United States.
Moderna believed from the beginning of the outbreak that BioNTech was using its generation and its patents, but waited until the pandemic subsided before filing a complaint, Bancel said.
(Reporting via Rocky Swift; editing via Tom Hogue, Jason Neely and Bernadette Baum)