IANS
Pharma giant Moderna has announced that its Covid-19 vaccine candidate has shown more than 94 percent effectiveness in preliminary data from the company’s ongoing study.
For the second time in a span of 10 days there’s a Covid-19 game changer on the horizon. Pfizer Inc had announced 90 percent efficacy exactly a week ago.
Taken together, these two vaccines are firmly on course to seek emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration if results hold out in final study results due soon.
Dr Anthony Fauci from Donald Trump’s coronavirus task force was optimistic that these early vaccines will change the course of “everything we do” over the next few months.
Pfizer’s final results are due in the third week of November, around the time of the Thanksgiving holiday.
Covid-19 cases in the US crossed 11 million by November 15, with the latest 1 million coming in a week. The country’s death toll is the world’s highest — more than 246,000 at last count.
Roughly 20 million people could be vaccinated against the coronavirus in December, the chief of the Trump administration’s vaccine coordination program has indicated.
Anywhere from 25 to 30 million people could be vaccinated each month after that.
The US is working with a portfolio of six vaccines, using three different platform technologies and two candidates from each platform: messenger RNA, live viral vectors and recombinant protein.
Pfizer and Moderna’s vaccines use the messenger RNA platform, Johnson and Johnson and AstraZeneca in partnership with Oxford University are on the live vector path while Novavax and Sanofi/GlaxoSmithKline are building out their vaccine candidates on the recombinant protein platform.
