The Supreme Court did not rule that vaccinated people are 'patented goods' | Fact check

Gabrielle Settles, USA TODAY
·3 min read
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The claim: The Supreme Court ruled that vaccinated people worldwide are no longer humans

An Aug. 6 Instagram post (direct link, archive link) showed a split-screen video: one side presents information about vaccines, and the other shows a woman reacting to it.

“The Supreme Court has ruled that vaccinated people worldwide are products, patented goods, according to US law, no longer human,” a robotic voice narrates. “Through a modified DNA or RNA vaccination, the mRNA vaccination, the person ceases to be human and becomes the owner of the holder of the modified GEN vaccination patent because they have their own genome."

The video also claims that all people who’ve gotten mRNA vaccines since 2013 are “legally trans-human,” and do not “enjoy any human or other rights of a state.”

It was liked more than 7,000 times in three days. Versions of it also spread on TikTok.

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Our rating: False

The Supreme Court did not rule that anyone who received an mRNA vaccination is now a non-human patent. The claim stems from a misreading of a 2013 Supreme Court ruling that had nothing to do with mRNA vaccines and predated the COVID-19 pandemic.

Supreme Court case: dispute over breast cancer genes

The claim refers to a 2013 case argued before the Supreme Court, called Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics Inc. It had nothing to do with mRNA vaccines, much less deciding whether a vaccinated person is still human. Rather, it was about the patent of breast cancer genes.

Myriad had found the location and sequence of BCRA1 and BCRA2 genes, mutations of which could cause a high risk of breast cancer.

“Myriad’s patents would give it the exclusive rights to isolate an individual’s BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes and to synthetically create BRCA complementary-DNA,” reads Justia’s summary of the case.

The association argued that patenting those genes violated section 101 of the Patent Act because they were products of nature.

The Supreme Court ruled that patenting naturally occurring gene sequences and their natural products is ineligible under the act, as USA TODAY previously reported. However, they also ruled that a synthetic gene created in a lab was patentable because it is not natural.

Fact check: No, the Supreme Court didn't declare vaccines 'unavoidably unsafe'

And the ruling had nothing to do with the mRNA technology used in some COVID-19 vaccines, it was about synthetic complementary-DNA constructs, said Jorge Contreras, director of the program on intellectual property and technology law at the University of Utah, as well as the author of “The Genome Defense: Inside the Epic Legal Battle to Determine Who Owns Your DNA.”

But even if it did, he said, a person injected with a patented mRNA wouldn’t become patented themselves.

“Does implanting a patented artificial heart valve into a person somehow make that person covered by the heart valve patent? Does taking a patented drug? Of course not,” Contreras told USA TODAY.

Contreras also said the U.S. Patent Act expressly prohibits patenting humans.

“Notwithstanding any other provision of law, no patent may issue on a claim directed to or encompassing a human organism,” the Act states.

USA TODAY reached out to the Instagram user who shared the video. In response, the user wrote that she only recorded her reaction to the content and did not have more information about it. She offered no evidence to support the claim.

Newschecker and AFP previously fact-checked this claim in 2021.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: No, people who got the mRNA vaccine are not patented| Fact check