The American drug manufacturer, Moderna, plans to apply for approval for the use of the vaccine within the next few weeks.
A U.S. drugmaker, Moderna, announced Monday that the coronavirus vaccine is 94.5 percent effective, based on early investigation into the results of the large, ongoing study.
Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel said the results “gave the first clinical confirmation that our vaccine can prevent COVID-19 disease, including serious diseases.”
The announcement comes barely a week after drug giant Pfizer and German biotechnology firm BioNTech announced the development of an experimental coronavirus vaccine that prevents more than 90 percent of infections in a study of tens of thousands of volunteers.
Scientists around the world are rushing to develop vaccines and effective treatments for the rising coronavirus pandemic, which has infected more than 50 million people and killed more than a million people in at least 200 countries where it has spread, according to data from worldmeter.com.
There are no proven knockout treatments for the coronavirus yet, and U.S. health officials say a vaccine could last at least a year.
According to a BBC report, Moderna plans to apply for approval to use the vaccine within the next few weeks.
“I said I would be satisfied with an effective vaccine of 75 percent. Aspirationally you want to see 90, 95 percent, but I did not expect it. I thought we would be fine, but 94.5 percent. is very impressive, “said Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the United States.
The report indicates that 30,000 people in the U.S. had half two doses of the vaccine, four weeks apart.
The rest had dummy injections and the analysis was based on the first 95 who developed COVID-19 symptoms.
Only five of the COVID-19 cases were in people who received the vaccine, 90 in those who received the dummy treatment.
Data also show that there were 11 cases of severe COVID-19 in the trial, but nothing occurred in people who were vaccinated.
“The overall effectiveness was remarkable … it’s a great day,” Tal Zaks, chief medical officer at Moderna, told BBC News.
Vaccine development
The World Health Organization (WHO) is coordinating global efforts to develop a vaccine, in an effort to deliver two billion doses by 2021.
Pfizer and Moderna were the first to release early data on major studies, but ten other companies are also conducting major Phase 3 trials in a global race to produce a vaccine, including efforts in Australia, Britain, China, India and Russia. More than 50 other candidates are in earlier stages of testing.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said coronavirus vaccines must be at least 50 percent approved.