The NIH is stand­ing by its as­ser­tion that three of its sci­en­tists should be list­ed in the Mod­er­na patent for the com­pa­ny’s lu­cra­tive Covid-19 vac­cine.

The spat is part of an on­go­ing feud be­tween the US gov­ern­ment and Mod­er­na that spilled in­to pub­lic view last month when one of Pres­i­dent Joe Biden’s top med­ical ad­vi­sors called out the com­pa­ny for fail­ing to de­liv­er on its promise to vac­ci­nate more low- and mid­dle-in­come coun­tries.

“I think Mod­er­na has made a se­ri­ous mis­take here in not pro­vid­ing the kind of co-in­ven­tor­ship cred­it to the peo­ple who played a ma­jor role in the de­vel­op­ment of the vac­cine that they are now mak­ing a fair amount of mon­ey on. We did our best to try to re­solve this and ul­ti­mate­ly failed but we are not done,” NIH Di­rec­tor Fran­cis Collins told Reuters in an in­ter­view yes­ter­day.

An NIH spokesper­son clar­i­fied that Collins de­fers to le­gal au­thor­i­ties on how this patent sna­fu might be re­solved. And he said there are gov­ern­ment lawyers look­ing in­to this right now.

The prospect of a po­ten­tial law­suit from the NIH would be an in­ter­est­ing shift for an agency that has al­ways steered clear of ex­er­cis­ing its so-called “march-in” rights, which hy­po­thet­i­cal­ly would al­low the NIH to chal­lenge patents where the gov­ern­ment has helped fund de­vel­op­ment.

The NIH told the New York Times ear­li­er this week that three of its sci­en­tists — John Mas­co­la, Bar­ney Gra­ham, who re­cent­ly re­tired, and Kizzmekia Cor­bett, who has since moved over to Har­vard — worked with Mod­er­na to de­sign the ge­net­ic se­quence that prompts the vac­cine to pro­duce an im­mune re­sponse.

While the NIH be­lieves these three should be on the patent ap­pli­ca­tion, Mod­er­na’s fil­ing from this sum­mer on­ly names the biotech’s em­ploy­ees, and the com­pa­ny said it had “reached the good-faith de­ter­mi­na­tion that these in­di­vid­u­als did not co-in­vent” the com­po­nent in ques­tion, ac­cord­ing to the Times.

The NIH’s anger with Mod­er­na comes as the com­pa­ny has ac­cept­ed bil­lions from US tax­pay­ers to de­vel­op its vac­cine and en­rich its ex­ec­u­tives, to the point where a few are bil­lion­aires now. Mod­er­na will like­ly haul in tens of bil­lions in more sales from the vac­cine over the next two years.

Quebec-based Medicago and its adjuvant partner GlaxoSmithKline said Tuesday that their plant-based Covid-19 vaccine candidate proved to be 71% efficacious against all variants of SARS-CoV-2 in a Phase III trial of more than 24,000 adults in Canada, the US, UK, Mexico, Argentina and Brazil.

In addition to showing 75% efficacy against the Delta variant specifically, the companies also said the vaccine proved to be generally safe, with no serious adverse events reported and reactogenicity generally being mild to moderate. The results mean that a regulatory submission will be filed with Health Canada imminently, they said.

The World Health Organization said late today that it’s not recommending the use of convalescent plasma as a treatment for Covid-19 for mild or severe cases, but some U.S. experts disagree with the recommendations and say there are patients who can benefit from the plasma of those who’ve recovered from Covid-19.

The recommendation is informed by a review of 16 RCTs and a “meta-analysis on antibodies and cellular therapies for covid-19,” the WHO said, adding in a statement:

Two lots of the Covid-19 treatment Veklury have been recalled by Gilead, the company said last week, after the appearance of glass particulates. A customer complaint was confirmed by Gilead’s investigation.

Veklury, also known as remdesivir 100 mg for injection, is used in more than half of hospitalized patients with Covid-19, according to Gilead. It raked in around $2.8 billion last year, and was the only drug approved by the FDA for this setting. But a study out of Europe dubbed DisCoVeRy found that no clinical benefit was observed in patients who received the drug over those who got standard of care alone. And while previous studies have linked remdesivir to a faster time to recovery, that result was not seen in the DisCoVeRy trial.