Moderna, the US-based biotech firm, on Monday said its vaccine shots provide strong protection with at least 94.5 per cent effectiveness against coronavirus.
Last week, Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech announced that their vaccine was 90 per cent effective.
The Moderna announcement that its experimental vaccine against Covid-19 was 94.5 per cent effective was based on the early results from a clinical trial with more than 30,000 participants.
However, the study is continuing, and Moderna acknowledged the protection rate might change as more Covid-19 infections are detected and added to the calculations. Also, it’s too soon to know how long protection lasts. Both cautions apply to Pfizer’s vaccine as well.
Dr Stephen Hoge, Moderna’s president, termed it “really important milestone” but said having similar results from two different companies is what’s most reassuring.
“That should give us all hope that actually a vaccine is going to be able to stop this pandemic and hopefully get us back to our lives,” Hoge told a news agency.
“It won’t be Moderna alone that solves this problem. It’s going to require many vaccines to meet the global demand,” he added.
“Since early January, we have chased this virus with the intent to protect as many people around the world as possible. All along, we have known that each day matters,” said Stéphane Bancel, Moderna’s chief executive officer.
“This positive interim analysis from our phase 3 study has given us the first clinical validation that our vaccine can prevent Covid-19 disease, including severe disease,” he said.
The US firm expects to have about 20 million doses, earmarked for the US, by the end of 2020 while Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech expect to have about 50 million doses globally by year’s end.
Moderna’s vaccine, created with the National Institutes of Health, is being studied in 30,000 volunteers who received either the real vaccination or a dummy shot. On Sunday, an independent monitoring board broke the code to examine 95 infections that were recorded starting two weeks after volunteers’ second dose – and discovered all but five illnesses occurred in participants who got the placebo.
But Moderna’s independent monitors reported some additional, promising tidbits: All 11 severe coronavirus cases were among placebo recipients, and there were no significant safety concerns.
The main side effects were fatigue, muscle aches and injection-site pain after the vaccine’s second dose, at rates that Hoge characterised as more common than with flu shots but on par with others such as shingles vaccine.
The Cambridge, Massachusetts, company’s vaccine is among 11 candidates in late-stage testing around the world, four of them in huge studies in the US.
Both Moderna’s shots and the Pfizer-BioNTech candidate are so-called mRNA vaccines, a brand-new technology. They aren’t made with the coronavirus itself, meaning there’s no chance anyone could catch it from the shots. Instead, the vaccine contains a piece of genetic code that trains the immune system to recognise the spiked protein on the surface of the virus.
Another challenge is that the two competitors face is that distributing doses must be kept very cold. Both the Moderna and Pfizer shots are frozen but at different temperatures. Moderna announced on Monday that once thawed, its doses can last longer in a refrigerator than initially thought, up to 30 days. Pfizer’s shots require long-term storage at ultra-cold temperatures.
“This positive interim analysis from our phase 3 study has given us the first clinical validation that our vaccine can prevent Covid-19 disease, including severe disease,” said Moderna’s CEO.
The company plans to submit applications for emergency approval in the US and around the world within weeks, and said it expects to have approximately 20 million doses ready to ship in the US by the end of the year.
Tuesday, 17 November 2020 | PNS | New Delhi
