Washington: As USA surpasses an alarming figure of 1 1million new COVID-19 cases on Sunday, pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer and Moderna bring the much needed respite with their trial runs of the COVID –19 vaccine. The new cases recorded just one week earlier were 10 million and only a week later it has surpassed 11 million. The number of people who have succumbed to the virus is 245,000 +
The Bio technology company Moderna declared on Monday, that it has noted a 94.5 percent effectiveness from the clinical trial of its experimental COVID – 19 Vaccine that was run on 30,000 participants. The vaccine candidate is being co-developed by the National Institutes of Health. This announcement of Moderna has come after the announcement made by Pfizer and BioNTech its German partner, last week claiming a success rate of 90 percent of its vaccine. Both these announcements increase the possibility of two vaccines being available in the USA soon.
Anthony S. Fauci– Director Institute of Allergy and Infectious diseases described this as good news said that although he was hoping for something as effective he wasn’t very optimistic on achieving efficacy in such high numbers in the trial runs . He was happy that the numbers showed good results. Fauci’s institute is co-developing the Moderna vaccine; half of those tested received 2 doses of the vaccine while half received a placebo. These groups were closely monitored by physicians. The trial runs were supposed to end early next year, but with the increasing number of new cases in the USA it may conclude sooner, and as early as within the next 7 to 10 days.
The projections made by Moderna mentions production of 20 Million doses by next year end, which will be enough for 10 million people to get two shots. Moderna aims to produce a minimum of 500 million doses by next year and depending on the availability of raw materials will also attempt to scale it up to 1 billion doses.
