Moderna Covid vaccine has '94% efficacy'

Final results from the trials of Moderna’s vaccine against Covid-19 confirm it has 94% efficacy and nobody who was vaccinated with it developed severe disease, said he company, kickstarting the approval process with regulators around the world.

The US company is submitting the data to the regulators in the US, Europe and the UK for an emergency licence. It expects the Food and Drug Administration in the US to consider it at its meeting on 17 December, Moderna said, according to The Guardian.

The UK has bought 7m doses of the vaccine – 5m on the day Moderna announced its interim result of 94.5% efficacy and a further 2m last week. But supplies of the vaccine to the UK are not expected until March. Moderna, based in Massachusetts, has received $2.48bn in US federal funds and was a key part of the Trump administrations Operation Warp Speed.

Although it has done deals around the world, the US will get access first. Moderna said it expected to have 20m doses of its vaccine ready for use in the US by the end of this year. In August, the US bought 100m doses with an option on 400 million more. Moderna says it is on track to manufacture 500 million to 1 billion doses globally in 2021.

Like Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna has used novel mRNA (messenger RNA) technology to develop its vaccine, involving the genetic code of the virus rather than any killed or weakened part of it. The two companies have announced remarkable and very similar results. Pfizer’s final data analysis gave its vaccine 95% efficacy.

Moderna becomes the third company to pass its data to the regulators for approval, after Pfizer and then Oxford University/AstraZeneca. The UK vaccine has 70% efficacy overall, although among a sub-set of volunteers given a lower dose, the efficacy surprisingly rose to 90%. That finding will now be trialled in the United States, amid concerns that it may be linked to the younger age of the volunteers, who were all under 55 in that arm of the trial.