By Dhirendra Tripathi
Investing.com – Moderna stock (NASDAQ:MRNA) traded nearly 3% lower in Monday’s premarket a day after Financial Times reported that the company is battling a shareholder proposal that wants it to share its Covid-19 vaccine technology with poorer countries.
The proposal also wants the company to answer why its prices are so high given the amount of government assistance it has received.
Legal & General Investment Management, the London-based asset manager, is arguing that even as the vaccine-make got at least $2.5 billion from the US government, it has shipped vaccines to mostly wealthy countries and has not transferred its technology to manufacturers in low- or middle-income countries.
Moderna is fighting the proposal at the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Meanwhile, FT also said that Oxfam, a global confederation of 21 charitable organizations, has teamed up with investors to file petitions against Moderna and Pfizer (NYSE:PFE) to demand that they do more to share vaccine technology.
Both Pfizer and Moderna have been under pressure from lawmakers and activists to cut their vaccine prices and ramp up production to take the life-saving shots to poorer countries.
Moderna is in a peculiar position because it developed its vaccine with the US National Institutes of Health. Barney Graham, one of the NIH scientists involved in the development process, told the paper earlier the government’s role in producing the vaccine gave it a “leverage” over Moderna in setting prices, something the company has aggressively pushed back against.