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Washington (AFP)
The American biotechnology company Moderna announced Monday in a statement that its experimental vaccine against Covid-19 was 94.5 percent effective in reducing the risk of contracting the disease, according to the first results of a clinical trial in more than 30,000 participants.
This means that the risk of developing Covid-19 decreased by 94.5% between the group of people who received a placebo and the group of volunteers who received the vaccine during the large-scale clinical trial currently underway in the United States, according to the analysis of the first cases. In this context, 90 participants in the placebo group developed Covid-19, compared to just 5 in the vaccine group.
If this level of effectiveness is shown to be the same in the population as a whole, this will be one of the most effective vaccines in the world, similar to the measles vaccine that is 97% effective in two doses, according to the Centers. for Disease Prevention and Control of the United States.
For comparison, the effectiveness of flu vaccines ranged from 19% to 60% in the past ten seasons in the United States, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine was 90%, while the Russian vaccine, “Sputnik V”, reached 92%, according to preliminary results published last week.
Among the people who received the vaccine, no one was seriously infected with Covid-19, compared to 11 people in the group of people who received a placebo, according to a statement from Moderna.
The statement indicated that about 9 to 10% of the people who received the vaccine had side effects after receiving the second dose, such as fatigue, muscle pain, or redness around the injection site.
“This is a critical moment in the development of our Covid-19 vaccine,” said Moderna CEO Stephan Bancil. “This positive progress analysis from the third phase of our trial gave us the first clinical indications that our vaccine is capable of preventing Covid-19 disease infection, including severe disease,” he added.
However, these results were not verified by independent scientists. More than 30,000 people participated in the third phase of the large-scale clinical trial, which began last July.
And if the US Food and Drug Administration approves the vaccine, the speed of its development will be a scientific achievement, as it will take less than a year for the virus to likely appear in China.
In the 1950s, it took nine years to develop and validate a measles vaccine. In the past ten years, the average development period of the 21 vaccines approved by the US Drug Administration has reached eight years, according to a study published in the journal “JAMA.”
In Europe, the European Medicines Agency has established an expedited mechanism that allows it to verify the safety and efficacy data of vaccines successively during their implementation, even before a manufacturer submits a formal application for approval. On Monday, Moderna became the third vaccine project to undergo this “rolling review,” after the two Oxford / AstraZeneca projects and then Pfizer / Biontec in early October.
© 2020 AFP
