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Washington (AFP)
Milestones for the launch of the first limited vaccines against Covid-19 began to emerge at the end of the year, after the American biotech company Moderna announced on Monday that its experimental vaccine against the Corona virus showed its effectiveness at 94.5 percent. , following a similar announcement from Pfizer and Biontech last week.
The company intends to produce 20 million doses of the vaccine by the end of December.
If the two vaccines are licensed for use in the United States, the administration of the President of the United States, Donald Trump, intends to produce enough doses to vaccinate the entire population in April. In Europe, officials are betting to start distributing the vaccine in January in case any of the developed vaccines get licensed with results to contain the pandemic by the summer.
The company confirmed in a statement that its experimental vaccine against Covid-19 was 94.5 percent effective in reducing the risk of infection, according to the first results of a clinical trial in more than 30,000 participants in the United States. In this context, 90 participants in the placebo group developed Covid-19, compared to just 5 in the vaccine group.
The duration of protection afforded by the vaccine is not yet known and only time will reveal this matter.
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.
“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.
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.
Experts welcomed the news, although details on the results were not released.
“We are starting to see more and more light at the end of the tunnel,” said Harvard University physician and professor Atul Guande, who joined the team providing recommendations to the next US President, Joe Biden, on the pandemic. “We will have many very effective vaccines distributed on a large scale, perhaps in the spring and summer,” he added.
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.
Moderna will require a license to bring the vaccine to market “in the next few weeks” in the United States, where production has begun. It will start at the end of the year in Switzerland at the factories of the “Lonza” group.
And if the US Food and Drug Administration approves the vaccine, the speed of its development will constitute a scientific achievement, as it would have taken less than a year from the time the virus is likely to appear in China.
– 20 million doses in 2020 –
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.”
The vaccine is given in two doses four weeks apart. It should be transported at minus 20 degrees Celsius (as opposed to minus 70 degrees Celsius for Pfizer) and later stored in a refrigerator (2 to 8 degrees Celsius) for 30 days.
The vaccine was developed in cooperation with scientists at the National Institute of Infectious Diseases.
The vaccine was developed according to modern technology (Moderna was established in 2010) that has not yet proven its capabilities. Genetic instructions go directly into human cells and reprogram them to produce an anti-corona virus on their own to trigger an immune system reaction.
For Moderna, which received $ 2.5 billion in public funds and the US government promised to secure 100 million doses, including 15 million, by the end of December, these results are the result of 10 years of development that have not yet passed. the initial stages of clinical trials.
Moderna has signed contracts with Canada, Switzerland, Japan, Israel and Qatar, and is negotiating with the European Union, Great Britain and the international Kovacs program.
It plans to produce 20 million doses this year and between 500 million and 1 billion in 2021 thanks to production plants and industrial partners in the United States, Switzerland and Spain.
Eco / Lille / Lynn
© 2020 AFP
