Corona Virus vaccine is 94.5% effective this was said by Moderna on Monday as it has passed phase 3 trials and it does not require Ultra cold conditions like that of pfizer but..
The DG. of World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, speaking yesterday said that a vaccine would not by itself stop the coronavirus pandemic.
Ghebreyesus stated this on a day US biotech firm, Moderna, announced to the world that its experimental vaccine against COVID-19 was 94.5 percent effective, marking a second major breakthrough in the search for a vaccine.
Pfizer had also last week said it had developed a vaccine that was 90% effective against the virus.
The pandemic is raging months after it broke out in China with infections moving past 54 million and 1.3 million lives have been lost so shows a data.
“A vaccine will complement the other tools we have, not replace them. A vaccine on its own will not end the pandemic,” Ghebreyesus said.
The WHO’s figures for last Saturday showed that 660,905 coronavirus cases were reported to the UN health agency, setting a height.
That number, and the 645,410 registered on Friday was way more than the previous daily record high of 614,013 recorded on the 7th of November.
The WHO boss said supplies of the vaccine would at first restricted, with “health workers, older people and other at-risk populations (to) be prioritised. That will hopefully help in reducing the number of deaths and enable the health systems to cope.”
He, however, warned: “That will still leave the virus with a lot of room to move. Surveillance will need to continue, people will still need to be tested, isolated and cared for, contacts will still need to be traced… and individuals will still need to be cared for.”
Meanwhile, US biotech company, Moderna, said yesterday that its experimental vaccine against COVID-19 was 94.5 percent effective, The second company to come out stating such in the space of a week with the other been Pfizer who last week said their vaccine was 90% effective in the fight against COVID-19
Both vaccine frontrunners are based on a new platform called messenger RNA, which is faster to produce than traditional vaccines and effectively turn human cells into vaccine factories.
Moderna’s CEO Stephane Bancel also said that,
“This positive interim analysis from our Phase 3 study has given us the first clinical validation that our vaccine can prevent COVID-19 disease, including severe disease,”
The company plans to submit applications for strategic approval in the US and around the world within weeks and says it is expecting to have approximately 20 million doses ready to ship in the US by the end of the year and between 500 Million and more next year.
The Moderna vaccine, which was co-developed by the US National Institutes of Health, is given in two doses 28 days apart, and the early results are based on 95 volunteers of the 30,000 who fell ill with COVID-19.
Of the 95, 90 had been in the trial’s placebo group, and five in the group that received the drug called mRNA-1273.
There were 11 people who fell severely ill, all of whom were in the placebo group.
The vaccine was well tolerated, with the majority of side-effects classed as mild or moderate.
After the first dose, about three percent of people had injection site pain classed as severe.
Among other side-effects that were classed as acute after the second dose, 10 percent had fatigue, nine percent had muscle pain, five percent had joint pain or headaches, four percent had other pain and two percent had redness at the injection site.
These adverse effects were however, “short-lived,” according to a statement.
“This news from Moderna is tremendously exciting and considerably boosts optimism that we will have a choice of good vaccines in the next few months,” said Peter Openshaw, a professor of experimental medicine at Imperial College London.
It is not yet clear how long-lasting the protection will be from either the Moderna or Pfizer vaccines, nor how well they work for the elderly, the age-group and those at the highest risk from COVID-19.
