COVID UPDATE 9:52AM PST

Fantastic news from pharmaceutical company, "Moderna" today: Its COVID-19 vaccine has been found to be 94.5% effective!

An article in STAT news explains,

"Moderna’s vaccine against Covid-19 is strongly effective, the company said Monday, building excitement about the potential of controlling the global pandemic.

The news comes exactly a week after results from Pfizer and BioNTech, which announced broadly similar results. 

The Moderna vaccine reduced the risk of Covid-19 infection by 94.5%. There were 95 cases of infection among patients who received placebo in the company’s 30,000-patient study. There were only five infections in patients who developed Covid-19 after receiving Moderna’s vaccine, mRNA-1273.

Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, admitted the preliminary data for the Moderna and the Pfizer vaccines — the only two so far to have early estimates of vaccine efficacy — are better than he had anticipated."

"Both Moderna’s trial and Pfizer’s are continuing and efficacy figures could decline by the time the trials are complete. It is often the case that a vaccine performs less well in the real world than it does in the setting of a clinical trial, experts warn. 

Furthermore, data from the two trials do not indicate how long the protection afforded by the vaccines lasts. That can only be determined over time as large numbers of people are vaccinated. 

The Moderna results, like those from Pfizer, were disclosed in a press release, not a scientific article, and limited details are public. 
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The Moderna and Pfizer mRNA vaccines, if approved, will become the first licensed products using an approach that has been thought to hold enormous promise as a tool for responding to new disease threats.  The vaccines contains genetic material that prompt the body to create a protein that sits on the exterior of the virus, effectively training the immune system to recognize it as an invader."  

Read the full article here. 

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