Moderna announces 94.5% efficacy for COVID-19 vaccine

Editor's Note

Moderna Inc (Cambridge, Massachusetts) on November 16 announced that its vaccine is 94.5% effective at preventing COVID-19. Their analysis of a 30,000-person trial (half received the vaccine and half received a placebo) finds that 90 of the 95 COVID-19 documented cases are in the placebo group.

The Moderna announcement comes on the heels of Pfizer and BioNTech saying their vaccine is more than 90% effective. The results from both vaccines come from interim analyses of large clinical trials in which half got two doses of the vaccines 28 days apart and half got two doses of a placebo.

The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines use the same technology, which is based on creating a messenger RNA code for making the coronavirus spike protein. The spike protein trigger’s a person’s immune system to produce antibodies against the virus without causing infection.

Moderna has been developing this vaccine in conjunction with the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases and plans to submit for an Emergency Use Authorization with the FDA in the coming weeks.

Moderna expects to ship about 20 million vaccine doses in the US by the end of 2020, and it plans to manufacture 500 million to 1 billion doses globally in 2021.