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A second experimental Covid-19 vaccine, this one from Moderna Inc., returned remarkably strong initial results on Monday, another much-needed dose of hope as the pandemic enters a terrible new phase.
Moderna said its vaccine appears to be 94.5 percent effective, according to preliminary data from an ongoing study. A week ago, competitor Pfizer Inc. announced that its own vaccine appeared to be 90 percent effective, news that puts both companies on the right track to apply for permission in a matter of weeks for emergency use in the US. USA
The results are “really amazing,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the US government’s leading infectious disease expert. “The vaccines we are talking about, and the vaccines to come, are really the light at the end of the tunnel.”
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 increasing restrictions. before Thanksgiving. The outbreak has killed more than 1.3 million people worldwide, more than 246,000 of them in the United States.
Stocks rose on Wall Street and around the world on growing hopes that the global economy could begin to return to normal in the coming months. The Dow Jones Industrial Average gained more than 470 points, or 1.6 percent, to close at a record high of more than 29,950. Moderna’s shares rose nearly 10 percent.
Both vaccines require two injections, given several weeks apart. US officials said they expect to have around 20 million doses of Moderna and another 20 million of the vaccine made by Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech to use by the end of December.
Moderna president Dr. Stephen Hoge welcomed the “really important milestone,” but said that having similar results from two different companies is the most reassuring.
“That should give us all hope that a vaccine will indeed be able to stop this pandemic and hopefully bring us back to our lives,” Hoge told The Associated Press. He added: “Modern will not be the only one who solves this problem. It will take a lot of vaccines ”to meet global demand.
If the Food and Drug Administration allows emergency use of the Moderna or Pfizer candidate, there will be limited rationed supplies before the end of the year.
Exactly who is first in line has not yet been 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 may be until spring or summer before anyone who is not high risk and wants a vaccine can get it.
Neal Browning of Bothell, Wash., Who rolled up his sleeves in March for the first trial of the Moderna vaccine in humans, said he’s excited about Monday’s “great news” but still wears a mask carefully and takes other precautions.
“I am very happy to be a part of this and to try to help bring some kind of peace back to the world,” said Browning. “I have a lot of hope.”
The National Institutes of Health helped create the vaccine Moderna is making, and NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins said the parallel results from the two companies give scientists “a lot of confidence that we are on the way. towards having effective vaccines. “
But “we’re also in this really dark time,” he warned, saying that people can’t let their guard down during the months it will take the doses of any FDA-approved vaccine to start reaching a large portion of the population.
Moderna’s vaccine is being studied in 30,000 volunteers who received the real vaccine or a sham injection. On Sunday, an independent monitoring board examined 95 infections that were recorded after the volunteers’ second shot. Only five of the illnesses occurred in people who received the vaccine.
Earlier this year, Fauci said he would be happy with a Covid-19 vaccine that was 60 percent effective.
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.
Scientists who did not participate in the trials were encouraged, but cautioned that the FDA has yet to examine the safety data and decide whether to allow the vaccines outside of a research study.
“We are not there yet,” said Dr. James Cutrell, an infectious disease expert at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. “If there is an impression or perception that there is only a rubber stamp, or if due diligence was not done to analyze the data, that could undermine public confidence.”
States are already preparing for what is expected to be the largest vaccination campaign in US history. First, the injections must get where they are needed, and the Pfizers must be kept at extremely cold temperatures, around minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit. Moderna’s vaccine also starts out frozen, but the company said Monday it can be thawed and stored in a regular refrigerator for 30 days, alleviating that concern.
Beyond the US, other governments and the World Health Organization, which aims to buy doses for poor countries, will have to decide separately if and when vaccines should be widely deployed.
“Many, many questions remain,” including how long protection lasts and whether the first vaccines that come out work as well in older people as in young people, said Dr Soumya Swaminathan, WHO chief scientist. “We also hope that clinical trials will continue to collect data, because it will really be important for us to know in the long term.”
Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Moderna’s vaccine is among 11 candidates in advanced stage tests worldwide, four of them in large studies in the United States. Collins stressed that more American volunteers are needed for those studies.
In other parts of the world, China and Russia have been offering different experimental vaccines to people before completing end-stage trials.
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 possibility 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.
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla tweeted that he was delighted with the Moderna news, saying: “Our companies share a common goal: to defeat this dreaded disease.” AP
