Moderna announced, on Monday, that its experimental vaccine to prevent Covid-19 is 94.5% effective. So, what is this vaccine composed of?
What are its pluses?
And why was he described as "amazingly cool"?
The answers we provide here and more, as we will introduce you to the effectiveness of other vaccines for Corona, which have been announced so far.
Moderna has become the second American pharmaceutical company to announce results far exceeding expectations within a week, after the alliance of the American "Pfizer" and the German "BioNTech" company, last week, announced that its experimental vaccine against Covid-19 proved to be 90% effective. % In preventing infection with the deadly virus.
What type of vaccine Moderna?
Moderna's vaccine consists of a synthetic version of the genetic material of the emerging coronavirus, called "messenger RNA" or "mRNA", to program a person's cells to produce many copies of a part of the virus, these copies are released. Alerts in the immune system, and stimulates it to attack if the real virus attempts to invade.
The vaccine is given in two doses 4 weeks apart.
It must be transported at minus 20 degrees Celsius (as opposed to minus 70 degrees Celsius for the Pfizer vaccine) and to be stored later in a refrigerator (2 to 8 degrees Celsius) for 30 days.
What are the details of the experiment?
Researchers test vaccines by vaccinating some study participants and giving others a placebo, then monitoring the two groups to see how many people have contracted the disease.
According to the "New York Times" report, Moderna announced on October 22 that it had completed registration for its 30,000-person study, and that 25,650 participants had already received two doses of the vaccine.
Half of the participants were given the experimental vaccine and half of them were a placebo injection of salt water. Neither the patients nor their doctors knew which received the vaccine, and the Moderna vaccine requires 4 weeks between the two injections.
95 people were infected with Coronavirus: 5 were vaccinated, and 90 received a placebo injection of salt water.
Statistically, the difference between the two groups was statistically significant.
Of the 95 cases, 11 severe cases were recorded, all in the placebo group.
The results were analyzed by an independent data integrity monitoring panel appointed by the National Institutes of Health in the United States.
And if this level of effectiveness proves the same in the population as a whole, this will be one of the most effective vaccines in the world, similar to the measles vaccine that is 97% effective in two doses, according to the US Centers for Disease Prevention and Control.
For comparison, the effectiveness of influenza vaccines ranged between 19% and 60% in the last ten seasons in the United States, according to the US Centers for Disease Prevention and Control.
The effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine for the Corona virus reached 90%, while the Russian vaccine "Sputnik V" reached 92%, according to preliminary results published last week.
Very important advantages
Among the main advantages of the Moderna vaccine are the following:
1- It does not need the south pole
Moderna vaccine does not need to be stored in very cold temperatures (such as the Pfizer vaccine), which makes it easier to distribute. Moderna expects the vaccine to be stable at normal coolant temperatures from 2 to 8 degrees Celsius for 30 days, and can be stored for up to 6 months At minus 20 degrees Celsius.
The Firees vaccine must be shipped and stored at minus 70 degrees Celsius, which is the normal temperature in Antarctic winter, and at normal coolant temperatures, it can be stored for up to 5 days.
Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University, said the relative ease of handling the Moderna vaccine would give it a major advantage.
2- It protects against severe injury
Moderna vaccine can prevent severe infection with Covid-19, which is not resolved yet for the Pfizer vaccine, and among 95 infections in the Moderna trial, there were 11 severe cases of the virus, all of whom received the placebo vaccine.
The important finding is that the vaccine appeared to prevent severe forms of the disease, said Natalie E Dean, a biostatistician at the University of Florida, according to the New York Times.
What are the side effects?
Moderna said that most of the side effects were moderate to mild, and that a percentage of volunteers felt more severe pain after taking the second dose, of whom 10% suffered from enough fatigue to disrupt their daily activities, and 9% suffered from severe body pain, and she mentioned that most of these complaints did not Long-lasting.
"These effects are what we would expect from an effective vaccine that delivers a good immune response," said Peter Openshaw, professor of experimental medicine at Imperial College London.
Did the study include children?
Children Moderna was not included in the study, said Dr.
Tal Zux, the company's chief medical officer, said the company plans to test it in the coming months, starting with teenagers.
How long is protection?
We do not know yet the duration of protection afforded by the Moderna vaccine, and only time will tell.
How many doses will Moderna make?
Moderna - which received $ 2.5 billion in public funds - the US government promised to secure 100 million doses, including 15 million, before the end of December.
It also intends to produce between 500 million and a billion in 2021 thanks to production sites and industrial partners in the United States, Switzerland and Spain.
Stunningly wonderful
For his part, the Director of the American Institute of Infectious Diseases, Doctor Anthony Fauci, welcomed in a statement to the French Press Agency, Monday, the announcement of the American company Moderna.
Fauchi, a member of the Presidential Coronavirus Cell and a very respected figure in the United States in terms of responding to the pandemic, said, "The idea of our having a vaccine that is effective at 94.5% is amazingly wonderful."
"This is a really amazing result. I don't think anyone expected it to be that good," he added.
Fauchi runs the American Institute for Infectious Diseases, which has focused on developing a vaccine for Covid-19 since January, when the Chinese authorities published the genetic sequence of the emerging corona virus.
Moderna vaccine is based on modern technology based on inserting genetic instructions into human cells.
To stimulate it to produce a protein identical to the Covid-19 virus protein, and to cause an immune response against this protein.
According to Fauci, "a lot of people had reservations" about this technology, "which had not yet been tested and proven effective," noting that "some even criticized us for that."
The alliance of the American company Pfizer and German company Biontec announced last week that its experimental vaccine against Covid-19, which is based on the same technology, has proven 90% effective in preventing infection with the deadly virus.
These two results confirm, in Fauci's view, the safety of this technology.
Because "the data speaks for itself."
He added, "I think that when you have two vaccines like these two, which have proven to be more than 90% effective," technology does not have to "provide more evidence."
A long way
However, the respected doctor warned that "there is still a long way to go," referring in particular to the logistical difficulties encountered in the transfer of vaccine doses, and expressing his deep concern about the anti-vaccination culture that prevails among a large segment of Americans.
"There is a widespread anti-vaccination feeling in this country," he said. "We must be able to overcome it and convince people to get vaccinated, as there is no benefit to any highly effective vaccine if no one is vaccinated with it."
And if the US Food and Drug Administration approves the vaccine, the speed of its development will be a scientific achievement, as it will take less than a year from the time the virus is likely to appear in China.