Dr. Ben Locwin
With Pfizer/BioNTech’s mRNA vaccine granted an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) at the end of last week, as promised, this week we are in the midst of review via the Vaccine and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee meeting for the next frontrunner COVID-19 vaccine candidate: Moderna’s mRNA-1273.
To be clear, last week’s EUA was an important and large milestone, for it represented the first authorization for public use of an mRNA-based vaccine. That regulatory precedent set the stage to make Moderna’s shot at an EUA that much more likely. As I’ve mentioned previously, we had no reason to suspect that Moderna’s vaccine wouldn’t perform as well as the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine. Indeed, the data Moderna presented demonstrated that their vaccine was overall 94.1% effective in preventing COVID-19 across 14,134 patients given the vaccine (and 14,073 patients given a placebo shot) in their Phase 3 clinical trial.