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Moderna says its Covid-19 vaccine is proving highly effective in a major trial, a second shred of hope in the global race for a vaccine to tame a resurgent virus that is now killing more than 8,000 people a day around the world. .
The company said its vaccine appears to be 94.5 percent effective, according to preliminary data from Moderna’s ongoing study. A week ago, competitor Pfizer announced that its own Covid-19 vaccine seemed equally effective, news that puts both companies on the right track to apply for permission in a few weeks for emergency use in the US.
The results are “really amazing,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the US government’s leading infectious disease expert. Earlier this year, Fauci said he would be happy with a Covid-19 vaccine that was 60 percent effective.
A vaccine can’t come fast enough, as virus cases topped 11 million in the U.S. Over the weekend, 1 million of them registered last week alone, and governors and mayors are tightening restrictions. before Thanksgiving.
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The pandemic has killed more than 1.3 million people worldwide, more than 245,000 of them in the United States.
Moderna president Dr. Stephen Hoge welcomed the “really important milestone” but said that having similar results from two different companies is the most reassuring.
Hans Pennink / AP
Nurse Kathe Olmstead prepares an injection that is part of a possible Covid-19 vaccine, developed by the National Institutes of Health and Moderna.
“That should give us all hope that a vaccine will actually be able to stop this pandemic and hopefully bring us back to our lives,” Hoge told The Associated Press.
He added: “It will not be Moderna alone who solves this problem. It will take a lot of vaccines ”to meet global demand.
The National Institutes of Health helped create the vaccine Moderna is making, and NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins said the exciting news from two companies “gives us a lot of confidence that we are on the road to having vaccines. effective “.
But “we are also in this really dark time,” he warned, saying that people can’t let their guard down during the months it will take for the doses of any Food and Drug Administration-approved vaccine to start rolling into a big chunk. of the population.
If the FDA allows emergency use of Moderna or the Pfizer candidate, there will be limited rationed supplies before the end of the year.
Both vaccines require that people receive two injections, several weeks apart. US officials said they expect to have around 20 million doses of Moderna and another 20 million doses of the vaccine made by Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech to use by the end of December.
Exactly who is first in line has yet to be decided. But Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said the hope is that enough doses will be available by the end of January to vaccinate adults over 65, who are at the highest risk of contracting the coronavirus, and workers in health.
Fauci said it could be until spring or summer for anyone who is not high risk and wants an injection to get one.
Another important message: Additional vaccines that work in different ways are still being tested, and despite the promising news about the vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer, more volunteers are needed for those studies.
Stocks opened higher on Wall Street news. Moderna is likely to hit an all-time high. The Asian and European markets also increased considerably.
Bill Sikes / AP
Moderna said her Covid-19 injection provides strong protection against the coronavirus that is increasing in the US and around the world.
Moderna’s vaccine is being studied in 30,000 volunteers who received the real vaccine or a sham injection. On Sunday (local time), an independent monitoring board examined 95 infections that were recorded after the volunteers’ second dose, and found that all but five illnesses occurred in the participants who received the placebo.
The study continues and Moderna acknowledged that the protection rate could change as more Covid-19 infections are detected. Also, it is too early to know how long the protection lasts. Both of these precautions apply to the Pfizer vaccine as well.
But independent Moderna monitors reported some additional promising data: All 11 severe cases of Covid-19 occurred among placebo recipients, and there were no major safety concerns. The main side effects were fatigue, muscle aches, and injection site pain after the second dose.
The Cambridge, Massachusetts company vaccine is among 11 candidates in advanced stage tests worldwide, four of them in large studies in the US.
Both Moderna’s injections and the Pfizer-BioNTech candidate are so-called mRNA vaccines, a completely new technology. They are not made with the coronavirus itself, which means that there is no chance that someone could get it from the injections. Instead, the vaccine contains a piece of genetic code that trains the immune system to recognize the enriched protein on the surface of the virus.
Another great challenge: distributing doses that must be kept very cold. Both Moderna and Pfizer intakes are frozen but at different temperatures. Moderna said that once defrosted, its doses can last longer in the refrigerator than initially thought, up to 30 days. Pfizer injections require prolonged storage at extremely cold temperatures.
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla tweeted that he was delighted with the Moderna news and said: “Our companies share a common goal: to defeat this dreaded disease.”
