2023 Author: Bryan Walter | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-05-21 22:24
Moderna has issued a press release according to which its anti-coronavirus vaccine was nearly 95 percent effective. This conclusion was made by the organizers of the third phase of vaccine trials after analyzing 95 cases of COVID-19. Among them, the vast majority were in the placebo group, including all severe cases. Detailed test results have not yet been published anywhere.
Almost a year after the emergence of a new coronavirus infection in the world, more than one and a half hundred vaccines for SARS-CoV-2 are being developed in parallel (we have compiled a list of them in the material "On the Point of a Needle"). Among them, only about a dozen entered the third phase of clinical trials, the purpose of which is to evaluate the effectiveness of the vaccine, that is, to calculate how many percent of vaccinated people are protected from infection (more about how it is believed, in our blog "The Magic of Numbers").
Pfizer was the first to announce its results. Its mRNA vaccine is more than 90 percent effective, according to company officials. During the Pfizer trials, 94 people fell ill with coronavirus infection, of which probably 7-8 in the vaccine group and 96-97 in the placebo group.
Following it, the preliminary results were summed up by the Russian center named after Gamaleya. After analyzing 20 cases of the disease, the researchers concluded that the effectiveness of the Sputnik vaccine is about 92 percent. The exact number of cases in the groups is unknown.
Now the third vaccine manufacturer, the American company Moderna, has shared its data. She was the first to begin her human trials. This vaccine also acts on the basis of mRNA, like that of Pfizer, but the tests are arranged in a slightly different way: the sample is slightly smaller - 30 thousand volunteers against 44 thousand declared by Pfizer - and other methods of analyzing the results (for more details, see the protocol on the website company).
The authors of the study planned to make the final conclusions after registering 151 cases of the disease in both groups (Pfizer claims this number as 164 cases). To date, 95 people have fallen ill among the volunteers. Of these, 90 - in the placebo group and 5 - in the vaccine group (the total number of each group is 15 thousand people). Based on these submitted data, the company rated efficiency at 94.5 percent (p <0.001).
In total, the researchers recorded 11 severe cases of COVID-19, all of them in the placebo group. However, according to the protocol, the company plans to make final conclusions about the effectiveness of the vaccine for preventing severe disease after at least 30 severe cases.
The authors of the press release also emphasize that the samples were quite diverse - for example, among the 95 recorded cases, 15 fell on the group of elderly volunteers (over 65 years old), and another 20 - from people from different ethnic groups (African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, etc.). etc.). How the cases of the disease were distributed between them is unknown. However, this could mean that the vaccine stimulates the immune response even in those with a weakened immune response - as is often the case in older people.
In addition, the company reports that side effects in the third phase of the trial occurred in about two percent of the volunteers and were fairly mild and short-lived.
More detailed data - as in the case of Pfizer and the Gamaleya Center - are not yet available to the public, but Moderna, like its predecessors, promises to publish it in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.
We also talked about other anti-coronavirus vaccines that are being developed in Russia and other countries. For example, in the article "Vector decomposition" we compared the work of the "Sputnik" vaccine with its foreign counterparts. And in the text "Dead Water" they wrote about the second Russian vaccine - the Chumakov Center - which is also admitted to the third phase of trials in Russia.
