[ad_1]
- Dr. Anthony Fauci has praised Moderna’s development of the Covid-19 vaccine.
- The vaccine is based on new technology.
- The vaccine has been shown to have an efficacy rate of 94.5%.
America’s leading infectious disease scientist on Monday praised the early results of Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine trial as “staggeringly impressive,” calling the findings an emphatic validation of experimental mRNA technology that some had doubted.
“I must admit that I would have been satisfied with 70% or at most 75% efficiency,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci.
“The idea that we have a 94.5% effective vaccine is astonishingly impressive. It’s really a spectacular result that I don’t think anyone would have anticipated would be that good.”
LIVE | All the latest coronavirus updates and lockdown
Fauci heads the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which began jointly developing the vaccine with the American biotech company in January, shortly after China shared the genetic sequence of the new coronavirus.
The vaccine is based on a relatively new technology that uses a synthetic version of a molecule called “messenger RNA” to hack human cells and effectively turn them into vaccine manufacturing factories.
Approval
No vaccine based on this platform has ever been approved.
“There were a lot of people who had reservations about using something that hadn’t been tried and true over the years – in fact, some people even criticized us for it,” Fauci said.
On Monday, Moderna and NIAID announced their preliminary results based on 95 of the 30,000 volunteers they had recruited who fell ill with Covid-19.
Of the 95, 90 had been in the placebo group of the trial and five in the group that received the drug, called mRNA-1273, which translates to a 94.5% efficacy rate.
Fauci recalled that some had questioned whether the vaccine would prevent severe forms of Covid-19, not just mild or moderate cases, and this had also been answered roundly.
“There were 11 serious events, none in the vaccine group, 11 in the placebo group, so the question of whether it prevents severe disease is resolved, which it definitely does.”
It follows an equally impressive result from the US pharmaceutical firm Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech last week, which reported 90% efficacy for their vaccine.
When asked if it was too early to say if the mRNA technology had already been tested, Fauci, who is generally known for his cautious statements, said the jury definitely agreed.
“I think when you have two vaccines like this, which have been shown to be over 90% effective, I think the mRNA is here, it’s established, you don’t need to test anything anymore.
“The data speaks for itself; it’s not me, it’s not my opinion, look at the data,” he said.
Duration of immunity
Traditional virus vaccines use real viruses that must be grown in chicken eggs or fetal cell lines and then weakened so that they do not harm people, a process that can take many months.
In contrast, Covid-19 mRNA vaccines deliver the genetic information necessary to create a protein found on the surface of the virus, called a spike protein, directly to cells in the human body, which then grow it.
This prepares the immune system to produce antibodies against the real virus and has the main advantage of shortening the development time of the vaccine to a few weeks, once scientists have the genetic sequence of the protein they want to create.
While Moderna has been the center of attention, Fauci was eager to highlight the work of NIAID, which he said was responsible for developing a precise way to orient the spike protein molecule in a way that elicits the strongest immune response.
But some unanswered questions remain, including how long immunity lasts.
Fauci said he was “sure” that it would last to some extent, as cells of the immune system called “memory B cells” were waiting to generate new antibodies against the virus.
But for how long was unclear.
“We don’t know if it’s going to be a year, two years, three years, five years, we don’t know,” he said.
Looking ahead, Fauci said he was concerned about anti-vaccine sentiment in the United States, the country that has been hit hardest by the pandemic.
“You have to overcome that and convince people to get vaccinated, because a vaccine with a high degree of efficacy is useless if nobody gets vaccinated.”
We know it was a long read and your time is precious. Did you know that now you can listen to articles? Subscribe to News24 to access this exciting feature and more.
