16.11.2020
08:08
The formula of the American pharmaceutical company also requires to be frozen, like that of Pfizer, but it keeps up to 30 days under ordinary refrigeration. The report was published after 95 infections were detected among the volunteers participating in the trials, of which the vast majority belong to the group that received a placebo.
November 16, 2020 Share on FacebookShare Share on TwitterTweet Share on WhatsAppShare
(Reuters)
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The American laboratory Moderna reported on Monday that its vaccine formula against COVID-19 has shown an efficacy of 94.5% in the preliminary results of phase 3 studies , a new ray of hope in the fight against the pandemic.
The report was published after 95 infections were detected among the volunteers participating in the trials, of which the vast majority belong to the group that received a placebo: only five of those infected had received the real formula .
A week ago, its competitor Pfizer announced that its own COVID-19 vaccine was more than 90% effective, news that puts both companies on track to request permission in weeks for its emergency use in the United States. The health authorities had advanced that a threshold above 50% would already be encouraging news.
Moderna explained that once defrosted, their doses can last longer in a refrigerator than was initially thought, up to 30 days , which would significantly facilitate distribution logistics.
Medical staff readying a dose of Moderna's vaccine (Hans Pennink / Associated Press)
Moderna president Dr. Stephen Hoge welcomed the “really important milestone,” but said the most reassuring was having similar results from two different companies. “That should give us all hope that a vaccine is actually going to be able to stop this pandemic and hopefully bring us back to our lives,” Hoge told the AP . “ It will not only be Modern that solves this problem. It's going to take a lot of vaccines “to meet global demand, he added.
Moderna's vaccine, created with the National Institutes of Health, is being studied in 30,000 volunteers . Among the 11 severe cases of the 95 infections, all belonged to the placebo group. Additionally, no significant security issues were detected.
The main side effects were fatigue, muscle aches, and injection site pain after the second dose of the vaccine, at a rate that Hoge characterized as more common than with flu vaccines, but on par with others such as the herpes vaccine.
The Cambridge, Massachusetts, company vaccine is among 11 candidates in the final stages of testing around the world, four of them in huge studies in the US. Both Moderna's and Pfizer-BioNTech's vaccines are called mRNA vaccines, a 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 stinging protein on the surface of the virus.
Cases of the virus in the United States reached 11 million in recent days, one million of them registered just in the last week. The pandemic has killed more than 1.3 million people worldwide, more than 245,000 of them in the United States.
Even if the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) allows emergency use of Moderna or Pfizer drugs, there will be limited supplies until the end of the year. The two vaccines require two doses separated by several weeks .
(With information from AP)
