Key Highlights-
* How goes Moderna mRNA vaccine work?
* What is the difference between the efficacy rate of moderna and pfizer?
* Is Moderna is better than Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine?
* What is the difference between Moderna and pfizer vaccine?
All About Moderna Vaccine
COVID-19 update, this time we're going to talk about the Moderna vaccine. Cases are still going up in the United States, and the daily deaths are increasing in the United States as well. And in terms of total cases per million population,the top states are North Dakota, South Dakota, and Iowa, so if there ever was a time to get a vaccine out, now is the time. So let's talk about this new Moderna mRNA vaccine and some of the recent results that have come out.
Quick Information
Name: mRNA-1273
Manufacturer: ModernaTX, Inc.
Type of Vaccine: mRNA
Number of Shots: 2 shots, 28 days apart
Possible Side Effects
Pain
Redness
Swelling
Tiredness
Headache
Muscle pain
Fever
Who Should Get Vaccinated
The Moderna vaccine is recommended for people aged 18 years
Let's have some details about-
We talked about the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine last time and I'm going to just sort of put up some notables about that vaccine so we can compare it to the Moderna vaccine. So one thing that's notable is that at 25 degrees Fahrenheit, the Moderna vaccine can actually last up to one month, but at that same temperature at 25 degrees Fahrenheit, which of course is below freezing, the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine lasts for only about five days. However, if you cool the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine down to negative 94 degrees Fahrenheit, it can actually be stored for up to six months. Of course it's difficult to get those type of refrigeration units. They are working on that.
For the complete information about Johnson and Johnson vaccine you can read---
So the other difference that we see between these two vaccines is whereas the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is on day 1 and then another injection on day 22, the Moderna vaccine is on day 1 and it's a little bit later; it's actually on day 29. So it's an additional week and when they asked the participants to let them know after which date they developed symptoms in the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, it was seven days after the last injection, whereas in the Moderna it was 14 days.
Now as you'll recall the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine results, and these were preliminary results that were released by the company and we haven't gotten the peer review data on this as yet , but they said and they quoted about a 90 percenteffective rate, and recently we also got data being reported by Moderna -- again not peer-reviewed, not published as yet -- but they are claiming a 94.5 effective rate, and while we haven't gotten a lot of detailed information from Pfizer-BioNTech, we actually have gotten some granular data from Moderna.
Let's talk about that at this point. So in the study, there was about 30,000 people and just like the Pfizer-BioNTech study there was racial diversity to the effect that there was around 11,000 people from communities of color. In addition to that, there was also 7,000 subjects that were 65 years and older, and there were 5,000 subjects that were less than the age of 65 that had comorbidities, and so what they did is they enrolled 30,000 subjects and, of course, half of these got placebo and half of these got the one, two injection of the vaccine. And let's remind people again that this vaccine works in a very similar fashion as does the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in that it is a mRNA vaccine, which means that this mRNA, which is encapsulated in a lipid bilayer is injected into the body. It merges with specific cells and the messenger RNA is released into the cytoplasm, not the nucleus, and while it is there in the cytoplasm, it will interact with ribosomes and the mRNA will be translated into proteins and it's these proteins that are immunogenic and will cause antibodies to form, as well as other diverse immunogenic responses, such as a T cell response, etc. So when they randomized these 30,000 subjects to either the vaccine or placebo, they did it on day number 1, they did it on day number 29, and they waited the 14 days and then asked them to call in if they had symptoms of COVID-19. Again, we're looking for the actual disease pattern of COVID-19. It was at that point that they were tested and what they did was they waited for 95 people to become positive with COVID-19. Now, that may sound like a small amount, but remember if the overall infection rate in a population is about one percent, then it's not unreasonable to believe that in 30,000 people that only about 300 people would actually become infected. So that 95 is a good place to do the interim analysis. So at this point when they got the 95 subjects, the data monitoring board unblinded their side to see which patients got the placebo and which ones got the vaccine, so they could make a determination about the efficacy.
This is an independent data monitoring board and, of course, this is not under the control of Moderna. Well what they found when they looked at those 95 cases is that, in fact, 90 of those got the placebo and only five of those got the actual vaccine.What is even more interesting, and what we don't have data from the Pfizer-BioNTech people, is that they actually had no severe cases in their cohort, whereas in the moderna cohort they did have severe cases, but all 11 of those severe cases were in the placebo group. So this is encouraging news, because it seems to show that the Moderna vaccine, number one, is 94.5 percent effective, and I don't know if that is statistically significantly different than the 90 percent here. So we don't know that Moderna is necessarily better than the Pfizer-BioNTechin terms of efficacy, but what we do see here is that it seems to be able to prevent severe COVID-19. What we don't know for either of these vaccines is whether or not these vaccines actually prevent infection of the virus, because here the end point was looking at symptoms of COVID-19. It would be interesting to see whether or not this vaccine actually causes a sterilization of the infection, and why that would be important is that if, in fact, this vaccine could actually prevent an infection with SARS-CoV-2, if it was effective at doing that, then you would see a drop in the transmissibility of this virus. It wouldn't be able to spread to other people, whereas if there was no effect on infectivity and only an effect on preventing the symptoms or COVID-19, then yesit would drop hospitalizations dramatically, but as we know, asymptomatic transmission of the virus is a big way that the virus is being transmitted currently, and it would be really interesting to know whether or not this vaccine could actually prevent that, too.
So in terms of safety, looking at both the Pfizer-BioNTech and the Moderna vaccine candidates, the data monitoring committee has said that they have not seen any serious safety concerns with the Pfizer-BioNTech candidate, and the data safety monitoring board for Moderna has also said that there was no significant safety concerns. Now with Pfizer, they have said that they're going to be releasing more specific data on safety in the coming weeks. Now Moderna has given us a little bit more. granular data, and you should look that up And in looking over the side effects, they were mostly mild to moderate, they were short-lived, and they were the type of side effects that you would expect to see with any kind of vaccine, even a flu vaccine, such as fatigue, myalgias, arthralgias, headache, pain and redness at the site. So you can see the differences here very clearly.The similarities are also very clear. Both of these vaccines seem to prevent disease very effectively, however, both are still in question about whether or not they prevent infection. In both you require two vaccine shots; in both of these vaccines there seems to be a good randomization and also representation from communities of color.
There also seems to be a lack of severe side effects that are concerning, but of course, because they've only been around for a few months, we don't have long-term safety data on either of these vaccines. And remember we also don't know how long this type of effect from the vaccine is going to last. And of course the other big similarity between these two -- the Pfizer-BioNTech and the Moderna -- is that they are mRNA vaccines and as it says here on the Moderna website, mRNA is a temporary set of instructions for cells to make a protein,and mRNA is made normally using DNA.