The chance of contracting corona after vaccination is 20 times lower

The US Food and Drug Administration said that an advisory committee will meet to discuss the request on December 17th, making the Moderna vaccine the second most effective vaccine candidate likely to receive the administration's support, likely to be introduced this year.

A week before that, a panel of outside experts will review a vaccine developed by Pfizer and Biontech, which has been shown to be 95 percent effective in the main trial.

The FDA will make its decision on the expedited licensing after the consultants issue their recommendations.

Moderna, which also intends to obtain European approval, announced that the effectiveness of its vaccine is stable in the demographics related to age, race and gender, in addition to complete success in preventing severe cases of the disease that killed nearly one and a half million people around the world.

"We believe we have a very high efficacy vaccine. Now we have the data to confirm that ... we expect to play a big role in circumventing this epidemic," said Chief Medical Officer of Moderna Tal Sachs.

Besides filing a US request, Moderna said it would seek conditional approval from the European Medicines Agency and continue talks with other regulators conducting similar reviews.

The company said that it is on its way to producing about 20 million doses of the vaccine, which will be ready for shipment in the United States by the end of this year, enough to vaccinate ten million people.

The vaccines developed by Moderna and Pfizer / Biontech use a new technology called the synthetic messenger for RNA, while other companies such as AstraZeneca are using more traditional methods.

AstraZeneca announced that its vaccine has an average effectiveness of 70 percent, and up to 90 percent for a subgroup of trial participants who got half the dose followed by a full dose.

The final efficacy result of the Moderna vaccine was slightly lower than an interim analysis published on November 16, and it was stated that the efficacy rate was 94.5 percent, a difference that Zacks believes is not statistically significant.

The moderna and Pfizer vaccines have proven more effective than expected and far above the 50 percent required for approval by the US Food and Drug Administration.

It is expected that distributing the Moderna vaccine is less complicated than distributing the Pfizer vaccine. While the Moderna vaccine needs to be stored in freezing point, it does not require extreme cold or special equipment that the Pfizer vaccine needs.

Moderna said that the 196 cases of COVID-19 in her experience included 33 people over the age of 65 and 42 volunteers from different ethnic groups, including 29 Hispanics, six blacks, four of Asian origin, and three multiracial participants.

The group that received a placebo vaccine had one death linked to Covid-19 during the trial.

"Your chances of getting infected if you get the vaccine are 20 times less," Zacks said.

He added that the vaccine caused highly flu-like symptoms in some of the participants, but did not result in any major safety concerns.

Moderna plans to start a new trial to test the vaccine in teenagers before the end of the year, followed by a trial on younger volunteers in early 2021.

Sachs said his company hopes to have its vaccine available to minors by next September.